


Set On Fire

by ficlicious



Series: Tumblr Prompts & Ficlets [15]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst and Feels, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Awesome Laura Barton, BAMF Laura Barton, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Consent is Sexy, Discussions of Terrible Things, F/F, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Multi, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Polyamory, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Prompt Fic, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, mental manipulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-10-12 11:02:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10489425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: She's not sure if she forgot to take her suppressants, or if something Wanda did screwed with her meds, but her world is on fire for the first time in years, and there's no one to help her through it... until there is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> When a conversation starts with "Do you take prompts?" I know I'm in trouble. :) 
> 
> The premise: Toni hasn't had a heat cycle since Afghanistan, but it starts up again after the events of Age of Ultron. Requested pairing: Toni/Clint/Laura.
> 
> Title from the Jeremy Taylor quote, "Love is friendship set on fire."

The alpha pheromones are killing her.

It’s all she can do to keep her shit together while Steve escorts her to her car, all she can do to keep up the sardonic smile and the quick, snappy retorts. It might almost be flirting, if she wasn’t so violently, vehemently sure that a roll in the sheets with Captain America would result in a tangled clusterfuck of a relationship she wouldn’t be able to extricate herself from. 

She’s had enough of those in her lifetime, thanks.

It’s a relief to slide into her climate-controlled car, and let go of her fragile control once the tinted windows are hiding her from Steve’s sight. She leans her head against the steering wheel and breathes shakily, focusing on the in and out of the air through her lungs until she doesn’t feel like charging out of the car and tackling the nearest alpha to the ground. 

She licks her lips and starts the car, doesn’t dare glance left to where Steve’s still standing, waiting for her to depart. “J, when was the last time I took my suppressants?”

There’s no answer, and it takes Toni a moment to remember that JARVIS can’t answer her, not ever again, because Ultron killed him. 

She drives through the shimmer of tears, peeling out of the Avengers parking lot like the hounds of hell are on her ass. “FRIDAY?”

“Yes boss?”

“When did I last take my suppressants?”

“That information is not on file, boss. You last picked up your prescription on the 30th of April, and you are due to refill it at the end of this month.”

She does the math herself as she takes the curves of the highway at just-barely-legal speeds, tries to sort through the chaos that is her normal thought patterns to remember when she dosed herself last. She knows even before she begins that it’s a hopeless exercise. There’s a  _ reason  _ she’d been so reliant on JARVIS and Pepper and a parade of assistants to manage her life, and that reason is because she’s utter shit at doing it herself. 

“I’ll count my pills when I get home,” she promises herself through gritted teeth, and if her foot is just a little heavier than usual on the way back into the city, JARVIS isn’t around to chastise her for it anymore.

**oOoOoOo**

Stark Tower is clean and bright, renovated and repaired, sleek and modern and brand-spanking-new in all the ways that should make Toni’s inner engineer splooge with glee all over the blueprints. 

Toni hates it on sight. 

She hates that it’s open, spacious,  _ empty,  _ because it’s only serving to remind her that there are at least six other people who should be sharing the space, half a dozen other people whose voices and laughter should be drowning out the lonely echo of her footsteps every time she crosses the floor. She hates that FRIDAY’s presence doesn’t fill the void the same way JARVIS’s would have done. 

She hates that, no matter how low she cranks the air conditioner, she’s running a constant near-fever temperature. 

Hates that all her medical needs were taken care of by Bruce who, despite claiming to not be that kind of doctor, sure as fuck had enough authority and legitimacy to scribble on a prescription pad when she needed him to. Hates that  _ all _ her scrips were issued and signed by Bruce, now AWOL and not likely to pop by to check up on her any time soon.

She does the math six times in the first two days, desperately cobbling together from fragmented remains of JARVIS’s code and her own sketchy record keeping the state of her heat cycle. No matter what way she twists the equations or tries to adjust the numbers, it doesn’t look good for her at all.

In fact, it looks downright terrifying.

One of the nice things about her relationship with Pepper had been the lack of priority on physical intimacy. They’d fooled around a couple of times, but it really hadn’t been a need on either of their parts. Toni’s religious adherence to her suppressants post-Afghanistan had all but killed her sex drive, and Pepper never had much of one to begin with. It was easy to lose track of her heat cycles, easy to forget her omega status, without an active sex life to remind her.

The way things are looking, bald and bare on the Starkpad in front of her, not only has she not had a heat cycle since her time in Afghanistan, she hasn’t had sex since Afghanistan either.

She switches gears, throws all her energy and focus into researching the effects of long-term heat suppression and methods by which she can continue suppressing the fuck out of it. The air conditioning in the penthouse continues to drop into Arctic ranges while Toni sits and sweats in a sports bra and panties, frantically running out of options on how to drag herself out of this shitstorm descending on her. 

Time runs out less than a week after that, when Toni wakes up with her sheets soaked in sweat and slick, trembling violently in the aftermath of a wet dream orgasm that’s done absolutely nothing to quench the fire someone lit in her veins overnight.

She’s so not prepared for this. She’s spent heats solo before, and she knows what she’s supposed to do, but she hasn’t done any of it. She’s not stocked on energy bars and protein drinks. She hasn’t checked the batteries in any of her heat-safe toys. She doesn’t even know if she  _ has  _ heat-safe toys anymore. She doesn’t even have anyone she trusts to check up on her, not anymore. 

She has just enough presence of mind to order FRIDAY to lock the penthouse down, no one in or out, not so much as a tweet to pass through her firewalls, until otherwise ordered. And then she crawls her way into the decadent bathroom, yanks the shower on full blast as cold as she can stand it, and huddles beneath the spray, fighting through memories of men holding her head down in buckets of water while her heat rages through her, unfulfilled.

**oOoOoOo**

“And you’re sure that she won’t mind us dropping by unannounced like this?” Laura asks from around the lock of hair she’s chewing anxiously. “No one’s heard from her in a few days. Doesn’t that usually mean she’s in her workshop and doesn’t want to be disturbed?”

Clint spares his wife a glance as he holds out his Avengers badge through the window of the car so the scanner can read the barcode at the bottom and let them into the private parking garage at the base of the tower. “You’re adorable when you’re fretting,” he says fondly, and drives in when the security bar lifts in front of the vehicle. “Toni has a habit of forgetting the rest of the world exists, but she isn’t going to mind us showing up. For one, I kinda live here, which means you do too. And Toni’s not going to keep someone out of their home when they’d like to get in. She’s not that kind of person.”

Despite his reassurances, Laura doesn’t lose the pensive, concerned expression as he parks in what he’s long since designated as his spot and kills the engine. He watches her for a long moment, keys in hand, as she gnaws that poor lock of hair to split ends and stares off into the distance with a frown furrowing her forehead. 

He gently reaches out and pulls the hair out of her fingers, and she starts and swings her attention to him. “We can leave,” he says quietly. “If you really think we shouldn’t be here right now, I can do without the stuff I left here awhile longer.”

Laura shakes her head and sighs. “I just can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong,” she says, then smiles wryly at him. “Post-partum beta hormones, maybe? I’m probably just being silly. I’m fine. Let’s go see how Toni is doing, and pick up the rest of your things while we’re at it.”

He slings his arm across Laura’s shoulders, and bends to kiss her ear, getting a good whiff of her scent as he does so. The smell of her shampoo and the ever-present underlay of that indescribable baby smell settles in his system warm and soothing, and he sighs in contentment. “I should have brought you here long before now,” he says. “You should have been a part of this from the beginning.”

She nuzzles in under his chin, wraps an arm around his waist, and smiles up at him. “I’m here now,” she says. “And that’s what matters. Maybe you can give me a tour before we leave, show me around the place you did your Avenging from.”

“You got it,” he promises, seals it with another kiss, and guides her past the bank of elevators towards the private lift only authorized card-carrying Avengers get to ride. 

**oOoOoOo**

It hurts to move, but Toni is eventually driven out of the ice bath by the gnawing hunger chewing her stomach to shreds. She’s pushed her tolerance to the limits, only managed to last this long because she’d been able to temporarily stave off the urge to eat by drinking her fill of the water pouring from the showerhead above her. 

She strips off her sodden clothes with limbs that feel weighted by iron blocks, and wraps herself in a fluffy towel from the rack by the tub. Her hands are shaking so badly, it takes her three tries to secure it around her chest. She leans heavily on the wall the whole way to the kitchen, sliding hand over hand on unsteady legs until she reaches the kitchen. 

When she finds bare cupboards and a fridge that only has an open box of baking soda on its shelves, she wants to collapse in a heap and cry. 

_ There will be food in the common area,  _ she thinks hazily, forcing herself to turn away from the traitorously empty appliance. The elevator down to the Avengers levels is terribly far away, but she painstakingly puts one foot in front of the other and shuffles towards it anyway.  _ Doesn't matter that they're not here. I haven't canceled the order, so there'll be food there.  _

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she reaches the common levels and finds that she’s wrong. 

Before she knows it, the elevator doors are hissing closed behind her, and she sucks in a deep lungful of air that doesn’t smell like heat and need. Her head clears with a swiftness that’s practically dizzying, and she leans her heated forehead against the cool metal, trying to gather the tattered threads of her equilibrium back into a semblance of order. 

She’s steadier when the doors open, and manages to not stagger or stumble as she moves out into the den. The alpha scents are old and a little faded, but her heightened senses pull them out of air, slam them into her head like miniature shots of adrenaline. She sucks in a deep, startled breath and lets it out slowly, hand fisted in her towel and nerve endings singing with the edge of flames again, but smoother, calmer, more settled. 

Unexpectedly, tears prick her eyes and she’s hit with a desperate, longing need for the Avengers to be here with her. She shouldn’t be alone, not now, not ever. For a time, she thought she wouldn’t have to be alone, because she’d found a family she could depend on. 

Just one more thing she’d been hilariously wrong about. 

“Food,” she reminds herself through gritted teeth and, grabbing furniture and walls and stools and free-standing kitchen islets, pulls herself to the fridge to find something to eat. 

**oOoOoOo**

The second the elevator doors open and Laura gets a noseful of distressed omega, long-dormant instincts wake immediately up, and she whirls to slap a hand on Clint's chest, halting his involuntary lunge forward, before she properly registers either of them have moved. He snarls abruptly in response, eyes wild and angry and fogged, and she had a long, bad moment where she doesn't think he's recognizing her as anything but a threat, an obstacle between him and an omega in heat. 

But she shoves him back again, and his eyes clear and his shoulders snap tense. She breathes a very quiet sigh of relief because wherever he went for that brief moment, he's back with her and in control again.

“Sorry,” he says, tight and strained, and shakes his head as if to clear it out. “Jesus, Laura. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-”

She silences him with a finger over his mouth. “Hush,” she says. “It's okay, honey. I know.” She takes a step back, eyes him up and down critically. “I think we’ve stepped into something of a situation here, and I don’t think it’s good, so if you need to leave to get your thoughts clear, you should go. I can handle whatever it is.”

He wavers, she can see the struggle he’s going through playing out in his face, and hopes he’ll do the smart thing and go back down to a floor that doesn’t reek of heat and misery. But she knows her husband better than he knows himself, and has resigned herself to him investigating with her before he even opens his mouth to say, “No, Laura. I’m okay. I’m not going to lose control. I’ve got this.”

She’s no alpha, has never had the supercharged instincts to protect and defend omegas, but her beta instincts have always been strong, and they’re screaming at her with every pheromone-laden breath she inhales to help the hurt omega whatever way she can. It has to be a thousand times worse for Clint who, despite being the most laid-back alpha Laura’s ever met, is still an alpha with all the baggage that comes with that status. “The second you start going feral…”

“You’ll smack me across the nose with a newspaper. I know, sweetheart.” Clint’s smirk might be strained, but it’s his best shit-eating smirk, and there’s nothing Laura trusts more. “I’ll be good.” 

“I know,” she murmurs, and threads her hand through his, holding tight, as they step off the elevator and into the common area. “Do you know who the omega might be? Does Toni have a partner, or might it be Pepper or…?”

Clint frowns, scents carefully, his hand painfully tight in Laura’s. “As far as I know, no one’s had an omega partner up here. I don’t recognize the scent. Or I do, I just can’t…”

He stops dead, so abruptly Laura’s nearly pulled off her feet when she keeps going, and she wheels around to examine him in concern, running a concerned hand over his sheet-white cheek. “Clint?”

“It’s Toni,” he says, so hoarse and quiet she can barely hear him. “Jesus Christ, Laura. It’s Toni.”

Something inside Laura goes still and cold, because the fog is creeping back into his eyes, and her stomach sinks to somewhere between her feet. “You need to go,” she says, firm and loud, and his attention snaps abruptly back to her. “I’ll find her and help her. But you need to get in the elevator now and get clear of this scent before you hit rut, or we’re all in a lot of trouble.”

He doesn’t reply for a moment, and Laura mentally prepares herself to find the equivalent of a newspaper to get his attention back where she needs it to be. Thankfully, all he does is shudder all over, then nod shakily and turn to high-tail it back into the elevator without saying another word. 

Laura lets go the breath she was holding in a long, drawn-out sigh of relief as the doors shut and the numbers above the frame start ticking speedily downwards. “One problem solved,” she mutters, then pushes her hands through her hair and turns back towards the common room. “Next problem.”

She doesn’t have far to go to find Toni, but she didn’t think she would, given the strength of the pheromones hanging in the air. Toni’s hauled all the cushions off the couches and love seats, and has made a nest of them for herself in the middle of the room. Laura’s heart pangs, sharp and sudden, at the sight of Toni, sodden hair and wrapped in a towel, face buried in a pillow and empty protein bar wrappers scattered on the floor around her. 

If the heat-scent in the air hadn’t been so laced with pain and hurt, Toni’s physical and emotional state is clear as crystal just from the miserable expression on her face. 

“Oh, sweet girl,” Laura says softly, goes to her knees while still safely distant, and crawls slowly, non-threateningly, towards Toni. “Toni, you poor thing. What happened?”

Her eyes open slowly, and Laura freezes mid-scoot, bracing for anything from an aggressive attack to screaming and panicking, but all Toni does is blink at her listlessly. “Laura,” she says, and it sends a new frisson of concern through Laura at how slow and deliberate Toni’s forming syllables. “What’re you doin’ here?”

“We came to check up on you.” It’s good to know that, even years out of practice, she’s still hitting the appropriate soothing tone of voice that made her such a good mediator while she was still active with SHIELD. “Is it okay if I come to where you are?”

Toni blinks again, slow. “Don’t,” she says with effort, struggles to lift herself onto her elbows and squints at Laura. “M’in heat. Nobody’s s’posed to be here. Nobody should be here. You should go. Don’t want anyone to know.”

“I’m a beta, Toni,” Laura says, makes extra effort to let comfort and safety roll off her words. “Your heat won’t affect me like that. It’s okay for me to be here like this, at least for a little while.” 

“Oh.” Toni’s eyes close again, and she settles deeper into the pillows. “Didn’t know. ”

“You don’t look well, Toni,” Laura continues, decides to press her luck and move a couple of inches forward. “I’m worried about you. Is it okay if I check you over? I’ve had medical training, including heat-sickness. I promise, I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

“It’s okay, Laura,” Toni says, and once again Laura’s worry ramps right up the anxiety meter at the increasingly disconnected tones of her voice. “I trust you.”

Before Toni can change her mind, Laura scurries forward until her knees are touching the edge of Toni’s nest. Cautiously, she reaches forward, brushes Toni’s hair away from her face, winces a little at the heat pouring off Toni’s skin. “You’re burning up,” she says softly. “How long has it been since your last heat?”

“Years,” Toni murmurs. 

Laura’s hands still on her horribly warm face. “Years?”

Toni nods, turns to follow Laura’s hands as she shifts them, and some of the tension drains out of her back and arms. “Been on suppressants,” she replies. “I think they stopped working.”

Laura’s never been one for cursing, but the word that hisses out of her mouth is as foul as she’s ever spoken. She pulls her hands back from Toni and shrugs out of her jacket. “You’re drifting in and out because you’re touch starved. I’m going to curl up with you, sweetheart. It’ll help center you, okay?”

Toni’s breath is a long, dreamy sigh. “Sure.”

Laura strips faster than she’s ever stripped in her life, and carefully crawls into the nest, taking pains to not disturb the arrangement of pillows. She can’t help but laugh in the back of her head, though, wry and without much humor, because she’s pretty sure Clint’s going to sulk mightily once he finds out there’s nudity he’s not invited to join. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Toni drifts back to herself gradually, wrapped in a comforting scent cloud of heady alpha commingled with steadfast beta. The inferno in her blood has banked somewhat, though she can still feel it coiling in her belly, lazily curling in whorls of muted desire and primal need. Someone’s pressed against her, their skin blessedly cool against hers, and their hands stroke soothingly across her shoulders and back, a rhythm as grounding as the steady rise and fall of the chest she’s sprawled against. 

She knows this is wrong, that she should be still sweating in her nest by herself, that there should be no one here to comfort her, to get her through her heat. But she’s close to whimpering with gratitude that she’s not twisting in the fire anymore, and she doesn’t have the energy to push away from the person she’s curled into so trustingly. 

She starts to filter out the scents enveloping her, sorting the oldest and most faded from the cloud because she knows once she identifies the freshest, she’s going to need to deal with whatever situation she’s currently in and she wants to put that off as long as possible. So many alphas: Steve, and Rhodey, and Natasha, and the Hulk peppered with Bruce’s earthier beta scent. Thor, alien but definitely alpha. Clint, oddly fresher than the others, but still muted, tempered by that strong sense of  _ beta  _ that’s maddeningly familiar.

It floods back to her a moment later, and she stiffens in panic.  _ Oh shit. That’s Laura’s scent. That means Laura’s….  _

“Easy, Toni,” Laura’s voice says gently, but she doesn’t try to keep Toni in place, just lets her scramble away from her, even though the last thing Toni wants to do is pull away from the first touch of skin-comfort she’s had in far too long. “Everything’s alright, Toni. Just relax. You’re safe.”

“Debatable,” Toni says, and her voice is raspy, sore, dry. She coughs and massages her throat, but maintains distance from Laura who, to her credit, hasn’t moved from her spot in the nest. “How’d you get into the penthouse? I locked everything down.”

Laura sits up, telegraphing her motions well in advance of her actual movements, and Toni hates the flood of gratitude at how understanding Laura’s being of her mental state. “This isn’t the penthouse, Toni,” Laura says gently. “This is the common area, where the Avengers live. Clint and I were coming by to see how you were doing, and to get some of his things.”

_ Clint. Alpha.  _ Panic surges again, and Toni frantically scans for any sign of him in the room.  _ No, no. Not now, not him. Not while I’m like this.  _

“Shhhh,” Laura soothes, and Toni’s attention snaps back to her as she rises to her knees, hands outstretched. “He’s downstairs. He’s not up here with us, I promise. It’s okay, Toni. Neither of us would do that to you.”

She swallows hard, past the lump in her throat, grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut as the panic finishes blowing through the rest of the feel-good haze she’d woke up in, and sluices straight into the banked-down fires again.  “Fuck,” she says, soft and heartfelt. “I think this might kill me.”

“Well, I’m not going to lie. It’s not good.” No matter how gently Laura says that, or how compassionate her expression, how comforting her scent, it still clenches a fist of fear around Toni’s heart. “While you were… out of it, you said it’d been years since your last heat. Is that accurate?”

“Yes. Not since…” Her throat convulses before she can finish the sentence, warmth flushing through her again, and has to close her eyes, fight against the urge to crawl back into Laura’s lap and let Laura’s cool hands smooth away the burns. “I’ve been on suppressants. All this time. I don’t know what happened.”

“That’s not important now. We can figure that out later. Right now, you need to take care of yourself, and part of that is not denying yourself skin contact. You can come back to me, Toni. It’s okay. Let me help. I want to help.”

The first time she met Laura, been face to face with that gentle, immovable strength for the first time, she’d thought that no power in the universe could ever possibly deny Laura the tiniest thing she desired. Toni is no universal power, not as thin and fragile as she currently is, and she collapses back into Laura with a whimper that’s half relief and half hopeless, feeling the surge of calmness and clarity return at the touch of skin to skin.

Laura’s hands resume their soothing patterns on her skin, and Toni hates herself for it, but she buries her nose in Laura’s neck, breathing in her scent and, fainter, Clint’s. “Do you have a partner we could call? Someone to see you through your full heat?”

_ Rhodey,  _ she thinks, then dismisses the thought because Rhodey’s been seeing someone over the past few months and the last thing she’s going to do is dial him up for a booty call because she screwed up her meds.  _ Pepper,  _ is her next thought, which is just as quickly dismissed, because that’s never been a thing Pepper’s been interested in, and while she’d probably be willing to take one for the team, that’s not a position Toni would ever put her in.  

_ Steve,  _ she thinks, but that’s so ridiculously out of the question she doesn’t bother finding a detailed reason to dismiss it, just lets it go without further examination. 

“Toni?”

She shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says. “There’s no one to call.”

Laura sighs, slow and deep, but her hands don’t stop moving. “Okay, Toni. Okay. A little while ago, you said you trusted me. Do you still trust me?”

She doesn’t need to think about it, which is frightening enough all by itself. “Yes.”

“How clear is your head right now?”

“Not as much as I’d like, not as bad as I was.” It’s the best answer she has, even if she’s not sure it’s the right one to give. “If you go, I’ll be fine, Laura.”

Laura’s hands still, then start again. “If I go now, Toni, you’ll be in bad shape before I get to the parking garage. I don’t want to leave you like this.” There’s a pause, a brief moment of silence, and Toni inhales two more deep breaths of her scent, lets the lassitude seep through her limbs, goes heavy and pliant against Laura. 

“I’m sorry for the trouble,” she mumbles, and tries to find the motivation to pull away from Laura again, regain distance, no matter what it costs her. She just doesn’t have it in her.

“It’s no trouble, Toni,” Laura says. “Everyone needs help sometimes. It’s a lot to ask in this situation, but… would you come out to the farm with me, with us? You need time with people you trust, somewhere you know you’ll be safe. Can I call Clint to come up and help?”

Panic surges again, sluggish but urgent, sharpened by the crest and swirl of animal interest at the thought.  “He’s an alpha,” she says, wants to move, can’t move. “I can’t live with it if…”

“Shh.” Laura’s fingers slide into her hair, combing slowly, tenderly through, carefully separating the damp strands from their tangles, and all the fight abruptly drains out of Toni. Not that she had much to begin with, if she’s being honest. “He has excellent control, and there are a few beta tricks I can do to damp everything down so it’s easier for you both. Will you let us help?”

“Why?” It’s out before she can take it back, before she can stop to think about asking. “Why do you care?”

“Because we like you, Toni, and we want you to be safe and well,” Laura says simply. “And if that’s too much for you to accept right now? Because we’d be shitty people to walk away and leave you in this state without trying to help.”

She should say no. She should tell Laura to leave, thanks but no thanks. She should be doing anything and everything in her power to deal with this on her own, the same way she's dealt with everything she's ever been through. She's always been self-reliant, always had no one but herself to count on.

She's just so tired of doing it all alone.

She's going to regret this. When this heat is over, when she can think without the last few days of pain and suffering clouding her judgement, she knows she's going to hate herself for involving the Bartons, for the disruption this is sure to bring to their lives. 

“Okay,” she says, barely more than a breath given syllables. “What do you want me to do?”

Laura's arms tighten around her shoulders, and a hand threads into the hair at the back of her head, cradling her in place. "Just breathe my scent and relax, Toni," Laura murmurs. "Just breathe."

**oOoOoOo**

It's been a long time since Clint's been this on edge, and he doesn't like it. If there's one thing he prides himself on, aside from his peerless marksmanship and finely honed ability to turn the most innocent remark into the filthiest of innuendos, it's his control over his baser urges. He’s been in the presence of omegas in or near heat before, and never felt so much as a twitch he didn’t want to feel. It’s one of the things that made him so reliable an agent, because it never mattered what dirty alpha-targeted tricks his targets used to try and throw him off. They never affected him in the slightest.

One whiff of Toni, though, and he’s ready to charge straight through his own wife, however momentarily, to get to her. What the fuck is wrong with him?

He likes running and hiding about as much as he likes being on edge, but over the years, he’s come to rely on Laura’s broad streak of pragmatic sensibility, and if she thinks he needs to be elsewhere, dammit, he’s going to be elsewhere until she calls the all-clear.

He retreats to his suite a level below the common area, breathes a sigh of relief when the door shuts behind him and seals him in nothing but his own scents, old and faded enough to make his nose wrinkle briefly, but anything is definitely better than the cloying, bitter tang of a heat gone bad.

Which is another thing he can’t wrap his head around. The Avengers have been a team for over four years, have lived together for large chunks of that time. He’d always assumed, with the exception of Banner, they were all alphas, because they all  _ smelled  _ like alphas. How the  _ fuck  _ had they all missed Toni being an omega?  

Scratch that. How had  _ he  _ missed Toni’s status?

He sits heavily on the bed and sinks his head into his hands, blowing out a deep, shaky sigh. There are too many questions, and not enough answers. If JARVIS were still around, Clint has no doubt he could wheedle at least a few tidbits of information out of him, but somehow, he doesn’t think that calling up the compound and asking Vision for intel is going to be quite the same thing. That leaves him with: “FRIDAY?”

“Yes, Agent Barton?”

The lilting feminine brogue is jarring and somewhat unwelcome, he’s so used to JARVIS’s smooth, crisp cadence. He shakes his head impatiently. No time to dwell on the used-to-bes right now. “FRIDAY, how long has Toni been in heat?”

“I believe it began shortly after boss left the compound last week, Agent Barton,” FRIDAY replies promptly. “She displayed increasing tolerance to decreasing temperatures, increased irritability, decreased appetite and heightened sensitivity to light, scent and touch for five days. All my data suggests full heat began yesterday morning when she woke from restless sleep.”

Yesterday morning? Almost two full days alone, in heat? “Why didn’t she call anyone?”

“I don’t know, Agent Barton,” FRIDAY says. “She ordered a lockdown of the penthouse and spent the majority of her time in the shower until a few hours ago, when she was hungry enough to go looking for a snack.”

“Jesus, Toni.” He swallows hard. His stomach twists, and bile rises in the back of his throat. He wants to be sick. “Jesus fucking Christ, Stark.”

“My sentiments exactly, Agent Barton,” FRIDAY adds quietly. She pauses for a moment, then says, “Mrs. Barton is requesting contact, Agent Barton. Shall I put her through?”

His head jerks up and his stomach clenches again, because he’s suddenly sure that whatever she  needs to tell him is just going to illustrate further how fucked up this situation is. “Yes.”

“Connection established. You’re patched through, Mrs. Barton.”

Clint’s on his feet and pacing without meaning to move, but he’s got to do something with the restless, helpless energy coiling his muscles tight and tense. “Laura? How’s Toni? How’re you?”

Laura’s soft, amused chuckle is a balm to his jagged nerves, and he can feel the stress loosening just from that simple sound. “We’re okay up here, sweetheart. I’ve got her stable for now, but I’m not going to lie. It’s not good, and there aren’t many options available at this point. I want her to come back to the farm with us, and she agreed. Reluctantly, but she agreed.” 

Clint pauses in his pacing, eyes the ceiling from which Laura’s voice emanates warily. Because it sounds like she’s suggesting… No, that can’t be it. If that had ever been an interest of Laura’s, she would have mentioned it long before now. “Honey?”

“You heard me, Clint. I’m not asking you to do anything that you don’t want to do, but Jesus, sweetheart. I can’t leave her like this. I’ve never seen anyone so skin-starved. She’s been denying herself a long, long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got through this heat on skin contact alone.” Laura hesitates for a moment, and her sigh is quiet and faint. “But it would be better with an alpha scent to keep her calm and centered. She’s getting yours from me, and it’s helping, but I don’t think it’s enough of what she needs for the easiest transition.”

His hands tighten into white-knuckled fists, and he relaxes them with superhuman effort. Jesus, it  _ is  _ what she’s asking him to consider and, fuck him, he’s actually considering it. “Do you understand what you’re asking, Laura? Do you understand what it might end up meaning for us and our family?”

Her sigh of exasperation is fond, but strained. “Remember my mother, the traditionalist beta? I’m well aware, sweetheart. She taught me like she’d been taught, so I’m up to date on all the traditional ways an alpha, a beta and an omega can be friendly. I’m not suggesting jumping headlong. I’m saying we have an immediate problem, we are more than able to offer a short-term fix, and I’m open to the possibility of a long-term solution if everyone else is.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and massages his temples, because even a floor away from mind-altering pheromones, everything is screaming at him to jump at it while he can. “Why now?” he says through gritted teeth, instead of the  _ yesfuckyes  _ clawing to escape his throat. “Why Toni?”

Laura’s silent for a moment, long enough that Clint starts to worry the connection’s cut out. Then she sighs, the kind of sigh he can hear a smile in. “I like her,” she says. “And so do you. I think it’s reciprocated. As foundations go, it’s a good place to start.”

One breath. Two breaths. Three. On the third long exhale, he opens his eyes. “Alright,” he says. “I’m in. If she wants to come home with us, let’s do that. I’m not going to have the focus to drive if she’s in the car, though.”

“If only you had a wife who had undergone some sort of extensive training to be certified to operate a motor vehicle and could perhaps produce a plastic copy of said certification upon request by law enforcement.”

“Don’t,” he says, pained. “Don’t do that. It’s weird when you’re snarky. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Laura huffs a light laugh. “Come up and help me get Toni down to the car,” she says. “And don’t forget the keys, control freak.”


	3. Chapter 3

The elevator ride up is the longest and the shortest he’s ever suffered through in his life. No matter how good the Tower’s filtration systems are — and they’d have to be fucking  _ stellar  _ to keep any hint of Toni’s heat from seeping into the lower floors — he can still smell a trace of Toni before the doors even open. It makes him edgy again, restless and impatient. 

But he’s in control, dammit. This time, he knows what to expect. This time, it isn’t going to take him by surprise. This time, he’s braced himself for the surge of adrenaline to slam through his system as primal urges kick into hyperdrive at the scent of a ready, distressed omega.

He’s not ready for the scent of Laura and Toni intertwined so intimately he almost can’t separate them out, and all the air whuffs out of his lungs when it hits him like a blow from Mjolnir.

He needs to be shortlisted for some kind of heroism award for halting himself after taking only one step towards them. 

He closes his eyes, sucks in a deep breath and gets his shit back together as he exhales slowly.  _ Slowly, Barton,  _ he reminds himself, and takes a measured, deliberate step forward.  _ Don’t scare Toni. Don’t piss off Laura. Don’t lose control. If you can go to war with an army of killer robots and keep a straight face while using a bow and arrows, you’ve got this shit.  _

“I’m here,” he calls, probably unnecessarily, because the elevator doors opening are pretty unmistakeable, but doing the most obvious thing he can do is probably the right call here. He clears his throat in a fruitless attempt to get the rumble out of it. “Can I come in?”

Out of the pile of cushions just barely visible around the arm of the couch blocking the floor from his sight, Laura’s hand lifts and waves him forward. He cautiously does what she wants, and freezes again when he rounds the corner of the broad couch. His throat works convulsively, and he grabs onto the back of the couch just to have something to stabilize him, because maintaining control this close to the source of that mouthwatering scent, drinking in the sight of them nude and curled together with Laura’s hands gliding over Toni’s pale, unmarked back, is  _ really, really fucking unfair.  _

“Laura,” he says hoarsely. “You’re going to bake me so many fucking brownies for how good I’m going to be.”

Laura’s mouth curves in a slow smile, and her hands still on Toni’s skin. “I’d bake you the brownies anyway,” she says quietly, then brushes Toni’s cheek with her thumb. “Clint’s here, Toni. It’s time to go, if you still want to.”

Toni’s eyes snap open, her nose twitching, and she orients on Clint with startling swiftness. The leather of the couch creaks as he attempts to strangle it with his bare hands as she sits up, smooth and fluid and gloriously, gorgeously naked, from her nest, but he stays as still as if he’s in a sniper’s perch waiting for his shot.

“I’m sorry for all this,” she says, and even her clearing her throat can’t change the deep sultriness of her apology. “I never wanted any of you to see me like this. I never wanted anyone to ever know.”

He pries one hand off the couch and holds it out to her, and is very pleased to see that it’s as statue-steady as ever. “Jesus, Toni, we weren’t going to kick you off the team. I never would have turned my back on you.”

“You can’t know that,” she whispers, and her eyes are huge, her hands are white-knuckled, and her entire body is trembling in need or fear. Or both. 

He makes an impatient sound, sees it start through her, but it was a deliberate noise, one of his usual scoffing dismissals of her statements. Calculated, but he always knows the angles and trajectories of his shots. This one hits exactly where he wanted it to hit. The sheer familiarity of it, a hint of their usual banter, eases some of that terrible tension in her frame. It does sweet fuck all to ease the tension in his, but little victories. “Dumbass. I’m here now, aren’t I?” 

It's an agonizingly long moment of silence, and holding himself perfectly still while she reaches out tentatively and trembling, pulling her hand back at least three times in the process, is one of the hardest things he's ever done. 

But then her hand, slender and shaking and horribly hot, slides into his and, with a sigh that collapses her into him, she's in his arms and nuzzling his throat, and her scent, underscored with Laura's, wraps him in wings of fire and tries to sweep him under. 

It takes very nearly everything he has to not fall into the mindless urge to rut that starts clawing at his resolve. But he promised Laura, and he promised himself, and he promised Toni, and he’ll hold onto the very shreds of it by his fingernails if he has to. 

He allows himself to bury his hands in her hair, bend to press his nose to the pulse point behind her ear, inhale deep and long until his head’s reeling with the scent of her, but that’s all he allows himself and it  _ hurts  _ to hold himself back, hurts like hell to deny and delay.

And then Laura’s hand touches the back of his neck and he surfaces out of the maelstrom with a sharp gasp that floods his system with oxygen so abruptly his vision swims. “This,” he groans, and can’t resist burying his face in Toni’s hair again, breathing her in, “is going to be a long, long fucking car ride home.”

Laura smooths her hand over the hair at the nape of his neck and gently starts to work his jacket and button-up free of his arms. “Shirt off,” she says, “pants on. Those are the rules. Can you handle that?”

“I can handle it,” he says because he might not be sure he’s exactly capable, but he’s a hundred percent sure he’ll die trying to be.

**oOoOoOo**

It goes against every safety protocol and highway regulation, but Laura doesn’t utter a word of protest as she helps Clint settle Toni on his lap in the back seat, tucking a blanket over them in lieu of a seatbelt. She isn’t sure, but she thinks Toni’s skin has cooled somewhat, and she certainly seems more settled with her nose tucked under Clint’s jaw, breathing evenly with her eyes closed, curled with as much skin as she can get pressed into Clint’s bare chest. 

Laura smooths a hand over Toni’s hair, then finishes settling the blanket around her and glances up at Clint, who’s showing signs of strain, but far less than he was before she’d gotten his shirt off. “How’re you doing, honey?”

“I’ll survive,” he replies, and most of the stress is out of his voice too, which is a good sign. “It’s easier now. I’ve got a handle on it. I’ll be okay until we get home.”

She lingers long enough to press her palm to his jaw, stroking across his cheekbone with her thumb. “If you need me to pull over and come back to help, just say the word. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t take your pants off.” 

“Yes Mom,” he grouses, but leans into her hand just a little. “Drive, Laura, before Toni finishes sleeping off whatever hell she’s put herself through the last few days. I’d rather not end up screwing in the back seat here. There’s hardly any leg room.”

**oOoOoOo**

It isn’t often Laura gets to drive Clint’s car, mostly because despite her better abstract and higher scores on the annual SHIELD defensive driving refreshers, he doesn’t like it when anyone but him sits behind the wheel. Truth be told, it always leaves her just a touch disquieted, because she’s far more used to sitting higher up and more securely in her minivan.

It isn’t often she gets to drive in such quiet either, because Nathaniel might fall adorably asleep the second he’s secure in a moving vehicle, but Cooper and Lila have long since passed that stage and both inherited their father’s boundless energy. If she’s not refereeing whatever their squabble of the moment is, she’s normally answering a barrage of questions about where they’re going, what they’re doing, where does she think Dad is now, why is water wet, can I write that glowing lady an email about her armor, is Thor really a god, do you think Captain Rogers will like my art, on and on and on.  

The quiet is a little strange, but it’s definitely a nice change of pace. 

She glances up into the rearview mirror at the sound of motion, a soft murmur, and she smiles softly at the image reflected. Despite still being sound asleep, Toni’s managed to get herself shifted around so she’s straddling Clint’s lap, with her face buried tightly in the crook of his neck, and he’s clutching Toni like a security blanket, nose in her hair and eyes closed tight. 

“You look like someone just walloped you with a two-by-four,” she says, and grins softly when his eyes snap open and meet hers in the mirror. “It’s cute.”

“Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he mumbles, then makes a stifled, muffled noise as Toni shifts around again. 

“Sounds like you’re enjoying yourself too,” Laura says, gives him a small but wicked grin when he shoots a baleful look at her in the mirror, then returns her eyes to the road. 

“Not nearly as much as I’d like to be. Christ, she smells good. You both do. I don’t know how you can think through this. More of your wily beta tricks?”

“Something like that.” She lifts her eyes to the mirror, notes the increasing strain in the corners of his eyes and forehead, the subtle shifts of the scent mostly chambered around them with the blanket.  “You’re a little tense, sweetheart. You need me to pull over and come back to help?”

He shakes his head, quick and tight. “Not yet. Soon, maybe, but not yet. Talk to me, maybe. Keep me distracted, focused on something else.”

She falls silent for a moment, chewing the inside of her cheek thoughtfully, listening to them breathe behind her, Toni’s slow and deep and even, Clint’s a little louder, a little faster, but just as deep and even. Listens to their soft noises, inhales their mingled scents until she can feel heaviness start to spread through her limbs, settling with delicious pressure in her belly. 

Clint’s voice cuts sharply across the lassitude. “ _ Laura _ .”

She shakes her head sharp and fast, blinking until the haziness she didn’t notice creeping around the edges of her vision dissipates, and she straightens the wheel so the car’s not threatening to drift across the dotted yellow any more. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly, then reaches out to adjust the air conditioner vent nearest her until it’s blowing cold air directly across her cheeks. “Even my wily beta tricks have their limits. I’m good. I promise.”

He sighs and his head thumps back against the backrest. “How do we end up in these kinds of situations?”

“Luck and timing, I imagine.” She glances in the mirror again, and once more can’t help but smile at the sight they make. “None of you ever suspected she was omega?”

“If anyone knew, it was Rhodes, Pepper. Maybe Banner. He dealt with medical shit. It’s hard to put anything over Natasha, but if she knows, she never said anything, not even in Toni’s files. I never had a fucking clue, and I doubt Rogers did either. Everything always smells like  _ alpha.” _

Laura arches an eyebrow, but holds her tongue as the GPS chirps quietly, warning her their exit is coming up in a few miles. Privately, she thinks Clint’s body language is screaming too much intimacy in how he’s wrapped around Toni to not have known on some level, but in a speeding car with Clint barely holding onto his higher thought processes is neither the time nor the place for that conversation. “Maybe she used a scent-masker to mute her natural omega smell,” she says instead, “or maybe it was a side-effect of the suppressants she told me she’s taken since Afghanistan. Seriously, nothing? Not behaviourally or anything?”

"She certainly fights with Rogers like she’s an alpha." Clint snorts, then makes another abortive, muffled grunt as it disturbs Toni and she shifts across his lap again, burrowing in more closely with her hand wrapped around the back of his neck. “Jesus,” he wheezes, more quietly. “I don’t think she’s going to be asleep much longer, Laura. Her skin’s heating up again. If full heat kicks in while she’s on my lap like this, I’m a goner.”

“We’re almost home,” she says, checking the mile markers flashing by and breathing a very private sigh of relief that the numbers are welcome and familiar ones. “Can you keep it together a little bit longer?”

His snarl of frustration and discomfort is all the answer she gets, but it doesn’t really need much more verbalization than that.

**oOoOoOo**

Toni doesn’t wake up so much as she becomes aware she’s no longer in the Tower, aware that she’s surrounded in the dual scents of an alpha and a beta, aware that her blood sings in her veins, aware that there are fingers digging into her hips, a high-pitched whine of distress buzzing in her ears and a frantic, familiar voice calling from a great distance for someone named Clint to hold on two more minutes. 

It’s been too long since she felt this way, so long she forgot how  _ good  _ it can be. How powerful and alive she is when she’s not fighting herself, not denying herself the pleasures available to her, not trying to hide her nature like it’s a shameful secret. 

She flexes her legs, stretches with a lazy roll of her hips, turns it into a fluid motion forward to scent the alpha beneath her, feels him tremble and buck under her touch, and laughs with a throaty, husky chuckle as gravity shifts and slides around her. 

Cool hands touch her shoulders, a gentle, firm voice coaxes her away from the alpha, and she whirls with bared teeth, thinking another omega has come to dispute her claim. But the scent hits her then, fills her with the impression of  _ beta  _ and the urge to fight for the alpha dies as suddenly as it was born. They’re both hers, she knows, hers without question, hers without challenge.

Time slurs and blends together in a long smear of hands and scents and cool, smooth sheets that slide over her skin like silk. She falls back into pillows that smell like the alpha and the beta and younger, less mature versions of their scent that could only be offspring, not fresh, not recent, not here, and rolls until she’s satisfied her scent drowns everything else out.

_ It’s okay,  _ the beta whispers into the alpha’s ear, and Toni understands how fortunate she is to have a beta who will strip the alpha for her.  _ We’re here. It’s safe. Come back, honey, and you can let go now.  _

And then there’s weight pressing her down, pressure and pleasure filling her abruptly, and the alpha’s voice is harsh and rough in her ear, telling her she’s beautiful and amazing and  _ so fucking tight.  _ And the beta tries to leave, to let them have their nest, but neither Toni nor her alpha are having that, since they reach out at the same time to pull the beta,  _ their beta,  _ into the nest with them, and everything but them washes away in fire and passion and sharp, deep, earthshaking pleasure.


	4. Chapter 4

Toni wakes up feeling gloriously satisfied. She’s warm and satiated; sore in ways she hasn’t been in so long she’d forgotten what it felt like to be so well-fucked by an enthusiastic and skilled lover. She revels in it long before she’s fully conscious, burrows closer to the body slung possessively over hers, lets the oxytocin and seratonin and endorphins and whatever other feel-good pheromones swirl in her blood, chase each other through her system. 

The last pangs of her heat pull low and faint, a distant throb like a mostly-healed bruise, but she moans soft and eager, chasing the final echoes of feral passion as they fade, and spreads her legs as she tugs at her sleeping bed partner’s shoulders. He rolls, face buried in her shoulder, still as half asleep as she is, and pushes into her in a single long, smooth thrust, murmuring in her ear with a sleep-rough voice how beautiful and incredible and amazing she is, feels, sounds. 

And it niggles at her for a moment, as she keens and locks her legs around his waist, rocks her hips up to meet his thrusts, that her bed partner sounds an awful lot like Clint does. 

She skates her hands up his spine, digging nails into the roll and flex of muscles, and drifts into his hair. Her breath catches, hitches, freezes in her lungs when his only response is to moan her name, grab a handful of her hip and seek out her mouth for a heated, searing kiss.   

She pulls back as cold panic trickles down the back of her neck,  because there’s no way that’s not... “Clint?” 

“Mmmph,” he replies, kisses under her jaw, pulls back until he’s smiling down at her, running the back of his hand down her cheek with odd tenderness. “Good morning, gorgeous. How’re you feeling?” 

She stares up at him, and her brain refuses to compute even as her body is definitely on board with what’s it’s doing. She makes a noise, soft and lost, and Clint’s warm, happy sparkle falters and fades. 

“Toni? Babe?”

“Get off,” she whimpers, so quietly she honestly doesn’t think she could blame him if he doesn’t budge, but he’s off her, out of her, away from the bed with his hands raised non-threateningly, in the space of a single breath. 

“Toni,” he says, and she doesn't know how he's managing to be so calm and reasoned, not when he's naked and flushed and hard and sweaty and fucking her not twenty seconds ago, and all she wants is for him to come back and keep fucking her and  _ what is going on?  _ “Toni, just breathe. It's okay, sweetheart. You're safe at the farm with Laura and I. Do you remember?”

She puts the bed between them, wildly searching the room for an escape, but his simple question spins her around again, staring at him in wide-eyed fright. Brings a trickle of images to mind, hints of memory, a distorted jangling chain of incomplete events. “Oh god,” she whispers in horror, seeing for the first time the bite marks, hickeys, bruises, scratches, marking his skin. What did she do? What did she make him do? It's so hard to breathe past the crushing weight on her chest, and her vision swims as she gasps for air because _she doesn't know what she’s done._

Clint's voice sharpens just a little, his eyes widening in alarm. “Toni, it's okay. I swear, it's okay. Take a breath, babe, sit down. I won't come near you, I promise. Just sit down and catch your breath, huh?”

She sinks to the ground, hand clawing at her throat, hand clawing at her hair to fist tight and pull taut. The sharp stab of pain focuses her just a little, and she still can't breathe but she can remember bits and pieces of how she got here. 

“I'll get Laura,” she hears Clint say, and it's like she's under water it's so distant and distorted, and horror sets up camp in her chest when she realizes she doesn't want him to leave. She doesn't want him to do anything but hold her and nest with her and keep her safe. Oh god, she didn't mark him like that, did she? _Did she?_ “You stay, honey, please stay, okay? Laura's who you need.”

His footsteps retreat in a rapid staccato of bare soles on hardwood floors, and Toni bends forward until her forehead is practically touching her knees, panting for air that refuses to come. All she can smell is heat and sex and blood and alpha and omega and beta and the fresh, acrid scent of panic cutting through all of it, and her stomach roils. 

She scrambles to her feet and beelines for the bathroom tucked into the back of the room, a hand slapped over her mouth as her stomach lurches again. She throws open the window, sucks in racking lungs of fresh, crisp air, but the smell has followed her in, is in her nostrils, her hair, her  _ pores, _ and the fresh breeze through the window does nothing but add new layers to the nausea.

Because she's at the farm, and she's slept with Clint, and she's gone into heat, and she's completely fucked up their lives because she's probably scent marked Clint too and that isn't easily undone, and she didn't ask for any of it, sure, but she should have found a better solution than trashing the lives of an entire family because she forgot to take her pills.

_ I'm going to throw up,  _ she thinks as her vision goes grey and spotty, and clammy, sick sweat pops onto her forehead, and can only hope that she doesn't make more of a mess for Laura and Clint to have to clean up. 

**oOoOoOo**

Laura breathes in the steam rising from her mug with a bone-deep groan of anticipatory pleasure, because after the last two days of Toni’s heat, she’s in desperate need of caffeine to begin to recharge her drained batteries. She knows she probably shouldn’t be out of the room yet, shouldn’t have left Toni’s nest, but it’s been hours since Toni’s woken up and reached for them, so she feels it’s safe enough to sneak out for a shower and a cup of coffee. 

The first mouthful of coffee hits her like the world’s best restorative, and she moans softly in appreciation. She takes another long swallow, ignoring the fact that it’s hot enough to almost burn her mouth, and before she knows it, she’s gulped the entire cup down to bare drops.

She hums to herself as she fixes another cup, then gets down the sterling silver tea service set her mother gave last Christmas and rinses out the carafe before pouring the rest of the fresh-brewed pot into it. She’s sore and bruised and tries not to hiss as the various minor injuries throb as she reaches and moves, but it’s the good kind of pain, the kind that comes from a couple of very satisfactory days in bed with kind, considerate, adventurous partners. 

After a few moments of consideration, she pulls down the box of Pop Tarts she keeps hidden from Clint and Cooper and Lila, and turns on the toaster oven, then opens the fridge and starts stacking fruit and yogurt tubes on the service tray too. It’s not the healthiest of breakfast, she guesses, what with the sweetness content, but all three of them have to be low on sugar, so she’ll let it slide just this once. 

She’s finishing up her arrangements, having cut down melon chunks and sectioned out oranges, stacked the pop tarts on a plate and filled the service pieces with sugar and cream, when she hears the bedroom door open and the rush of Clint in his bare feet coming down the hallway towards her.

She turns as he enters the kitchen, and her good mood plummets to die a quick, strangled death somewhere between her feet. He’s naked and shaky, ashen-faced and wide-eyed, and Laura immediately knows something bad’s happened. She shouldn't have left the room. “Clint?”

He swallows hard. “Toni’s awake,” he says simply. “She needs you. I think I scared her.” She bites her lip and reaches out to touch his cheek soothingly, but he jerks back from her. “No, don’t. She doesn’t want my scent anywhere near her right now. I’m okay, Laura.”

She pulls back her hand slowly, wanting to call him a liar because he hasn’t recoiled from her like that since the guilt over his part in the Chitauri invasion chewed him up inside, but she knows this isn’t the time or the place to force that conversation.  “Okay,” she says, and pretends not to see the grateful expression that she’s choosing not to push it.  “I’ll take care of Toni. You get a shower and finish taking care of breakfast?”

“Sure,” he says, and Laura bites her lip again because that was too ready an agreement, but she has to prioritize. She hopes she’s not making the wrong choice here, but she has a feeling that whatever’s bothering Clint right now, she’s going to need Toni’s help in unwinding it. 

\----

The shower’s running when she gets into the bedroom, and Laura wrinkles her nose at the heavy smells hanging in the air. She doesn’t find them unpleasant, as much as thick and pervasive, reminders of something that’s normally celebrated. She sighs faintly, takes a stolen moment to rub her temples in frustration, because nothing about this is normal. If Toni’s heat is over and she’s returning to her usual thought patterns, Laura can’t see how the odors would be be anything but upsetting to her. 

She throws open the windows, shivering just a little in the crisp early-morning breeze that immediately starts blowing through it. She strips the bed with practiced twists of her wrist, dumping the soiled sheets in the lidded, wicker laundry basket in the corner of the room. She pulls fresh linens out of the hall closet and remakes the bed as swiftly as she stripped it, then takes the basket and sets it outside the door to take to the laundry room when she has a chance. 

She double- and triple-checks the room, thankful that the heat-smells are already lifting now that the bed’s been changed and the open window is airing the space out, then taps on the half-open bathroom door. “Toni? May I come in?”

For a moment, there’s nothing but silence, punctuated by the sound of running water. Then Toni clears her throat and croaks, “Sure, Laura. I don’t mind.”

Laura shakes her head as she slides into the bathroom, leaving the door open since Toni had — an obvious means of escape, she thinks; closing it might trigger a panic attack if Toni thinks she’s closed in — and sits on the closed seat of the toilet. “You sound like you’re crying, Toni,” she says, direct but gentle. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Toni says, and clears her throat again. “Starks are made of iron. If I cry, I’d probably rust, and since that would play absolute hell on my complexion, it’s something I avoid at all costs.”

_ Oh, Toni.  _ She shakes her head again. “Did Clint ever mention what I did before we were married?” she asks.

Another pause, and Toni's silhouette against the translucent curtain freezes in the act of, Laura thinks, scrubbing her hair. “No, that was one of the things that never came up when he never mentioned you at all.”

Laura closes her eyes and rubs her forehead again. Lord help her, she’s got two of them now, sarcasm and snark worn like armor. Good thing she doesn’t believe she has ever been given burdens heavier than they’re capable of carrying. From her long association with Clint, she knows Toni’s expecting some sort of anger or frustration in return, which is why she tamps down on the natural, human instinct to respond in kind and say instead, in her calmest, blandest tone, “I was a SHIELD mediator, Toni. I helped negotiate a lot of treaties and ceasefires and contracts in my career.”

“Huh,” Toni says, and her tone suggests to Laura that she’s thinking intently. “Were you any good? Cos I’ve got union contracts coming up for renewal and I could use a—”

“When a job became too frustrating for Phil Coulson,” she says, ruthlessly but politely cutting Toni short before she can ramble Laura into distraction, “Director Fury knocked on my office door.”

She can almost hear Toni swallow whatever pithy remark she’d been preparing to use next. She sticks her head out of the space between the shower curtain and the tiled wall, and her eyes are hollow and huge. “So what you’re saying is that none of my usual deflection bullshit is going to work on you.”

Laura smiles gently, reassuringly, and holds her hand out to Toni with a questioning gesture. When Toni doesn’t retreat or shake her head, she brushes Toni’s forehead with the barest of butterfly touches, and trails her fingertips down over Toni’s cheek. “That is exactly what I’m saying, sweetie. Are you almost done? Would you like me to come in and help?”

Toni swallows, and her eyes go pained and yearning. “I’m a big girl, Laura. I can take a shower by myself.”

Laura  _ tsks.  _ “I thought we just went over this, Toni. I didn’t question your capability to take a shower. I asked if you’d like company in your shower. And if you don’t, just say so. I won’t be offended or upset.”

Toni doesn’t immediately decline, which Laura decides to take as a good sign, but she doesn’t accept either, which is a little worrisome, because it might mean Toni’s not capable of asking for things she wants or needs. Laura brushes her hand over Toni’s face again, and tries a different tactic. “How about this: if you don’t want me to join you, say no. If you do but you can’t bring yourself to ask me, say nothing.”

Toni’s mouth opens and closes, and she stares at Laura for a long moment. Then she pulls her head back into the shower without saying a word. Laura gives her another moment, in case she wants to change her mind, but when the silence continues uninterrupted, she stands and sheds her terrycloth robe. One little victory at a time, she reminds herself, and steps into the shower with Toni. 

In hindsight, she should have expected Toni’s expression and demeanour to change the second she catches sight of the marks left all over Laura’s body, and she curses herself for a fool that she didn’t stop to consider how visibly Toni’s heat is scratched and pressed into her flesh. “Laura,” she says, strangled and sick, but Laura just shakes her head and cups Toni’s face between her palms. 

“Don’t do that,” she says, and smiles when Toni’s gaze skitters up to meet hers. “I enjoyed getting every single one of these marks, Toni, and I’ll probably mourn them a little when they finally fade.”

Toni’s face wavers, then crumples, and her head bows. Her shoulders shake and her hands fist by her sides. “I’ve fucked everything up,” she says, desolate and lost, and Laura knows with sudden certainty that she needs to be very, very careful, more careful than she’s ever been, in how she handles this conversation. 

“I understand how you feel that way,” she says, and reaches for the bottle of lightly scented cucumber shampoo she keeps in lieu of other, heavier, more floral brands. She squeezes a healthy dollop into her palms, works it into suds, and moves carefully as she works it into Toni’s hair. Toni makes a muffled noise of enjoyment, and some of the tension drains out of her shoulders, so Laura increases the pressure just a little, massaging Toni’s scalp as she smooths the shampoo through her sodden hair. 

“How can you?” Toni mumbles, and her forehead comes to rest on Laura’s shoulder as Laura rinses the shampoo out, then picks up a loofah and the body wash that matches the shampoo. “I don’t understand how I feel. And I don’t understand why you’re not fucking furious that I’ve barged into your life like this and completely screwed it up.” 

Laura frowns, carefully works the loofah into a lather and pulls Toni’s freshly-cleaned hair out of the way to wash her back. “Honestly, Toni, I can’t imagine how you’re feeling right now and I’m not going to try to tell you everything will be alright, because I can’t promise that it will be. There are too many things I haven’t the experience, knowledge or control to promise will be okay. But I can promise that the things that are in my control, like how I’ve felt about the last few days with you? Those things are the ones I know for certain are going to be okay, at least on my part.”

“Why?” Toni whispers, lifts her eyes to Laura. “Why are they okay? They shouldn’t be, Laura. They shouldn’t be anywhere  _ near  _ okay. I’ve practically forced both of you into bed with me because I can’t manage to take my medication on a proper schedule. I rolled Clint under because he’s a goddamn alpha and omega heat is like a drug for alphas, and then dragged you into it because… because….”

“Toni, sweetheart…” Laura discards the loofah and enfolds Toni into the warmest hug she can. It’s instinctual and could be a very bad decision, but all Toni does is collapse into her and sob into her shoulder. “You didn’t roll Clint under. You didn’t drag me anywhere. You know what Clint does when he’s affected by omega heat? He comes home and fucks me like there’s an Olympic gold medal at stake. We  _ chose  _ you, just like you chose us. I know you can’t believe me right now, so I’ll just keep saying it until you do, okay?”

“Okay,” Toni murmurs, and clearly doesn’t believe her even the slightest. Laura sighs. This is going to take a lot of time and effort, but if there’s one thing she’s never done, it’s shy away from hard work. The rewards are always worth it. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short but sweet. Enjoy. :)
> 
> (There's also a bit of angst. Enjoy that too!)

Clint scrubs until his skin is nearly raw, but still can’t wash the sick disgust out of his pores. The look in Toni’s eyes haunts him, when all her passion and pleasure shifted to confusion and terror, when she stopped moaning for him and started whimpering because of him. And sure, he stopped immediately when she told him to, but that doesn’t change the fact that he started in the first place, and that fact is going to haunt him for the rest of his fucking life. 

The sour bite of bile lingers at the back of his throat as he rinses off and towels briskly dry. He can’t smell anything but himself now, no lingering scent of Toni and Laura and what was frankly a phenomenal two days, and he hates that he’s already mourning it. 

After what he’s done, he’s got no right to miss any of it. 

There’s a small part of his brain, trying to make him pay attention to the logic, that tells him he’s not at fault, it’s a natural reaction to his omega’s heat, it’s the last dregs of a full rut, there’s no way he could have known… but logic doesn’t play ball in this game, and it never has. 

He pads back to the bedroom, notes the laundry basket outside the door, and cautiously peers around the frame to make sure he’s not intruding on anything before he goes in. He can barely smell anything in here anymore; Laura’s changed the sheets, and the open window has done a fairly good job of airing everything out. If he hurries, Toni won’t be able to smell his presence in here at all. 

The shower’s running, Laura’s voice murmuring indistinctly beneath the cascading water, but he gives the bathroom door a wide berth to rummage through his side of the dresser and fish out jeans and a t-shirt. He hauls them on and starts to exit again, then pauses and stares at the black bowcase standing on its rack beside the closet door. After a moment’s hesitation, he sighs and grabs it, then shoulders it as he makes his way back out to the kitchen. 

He’s definitely in need of some time on the range today. Right after he does what Laura asked, and finishes breakfast. He just hopes he can manage to complete whatever it is that’s left in need of doing before Toni and Laura decide to come out to the kitchen. The last thing he wants to do is force more of his presence on Toni when she doesn’t want or need it. 

She deserves far better than that. 

**oOoOoOo**

Laura runs into a problem when she realizes neither she nor Clint thought to grab Toni any of her own clothing before they left the Tower. She’s pretty sure that, between her side of the closet and Clint’s side, they have enough clothes in Toni’s size range, but she’s not at all sure Toni’s going to want to wear any of it. 

She bundles Toni in a fresh bath towel, wraps a second around her hair, and rubs her back soothingly as she leads her into the bedroom.  A sensation very near to panic claws at Laura's hindbrain, every sensible beta instinct she possesses yelling at her that she's screwed up and big, but not for nothing was she considered the go-to agent when blood was literally seconds from being spilled. She's not even that out of practice with controlling herself; the miracles of parenting children with Clint's DNA have kept her self-control sharp and her patience honed.

“There we go,” she says in tones perfectly beta-pitched to calm even the most enraged alpha, and seats an unresisting Toni on the edge of the bed. Under no circumstances is she letting Toni see how frantically she’s wracking her brain to come up with a solution to the clothing dilemma. “Feeling any better at all?”

Toni’s eyes dart around the room and focus on the open door leading to the rest of the house. “A little,” she admits quietly, then takes in a shaky breath. “The house is quiet. Is Clint gone?”

Laura pauses and tilts her head, and watches Toni carefully as she replies, “He would have said something if he was leaving to go somewhere. His bow case is gone, so he’s probably just out back shooting hay bales. I wouldn’t worry about him. He’s not far.”

Interestingly, Toni’s tension doesn’t ratchet up as Laura speaks, like she expected it might. Instead, it goes the opposite direction; when Laura confirms he’s still on the farm, Toni slumps and presses a hand to her face, lets out her held breath in a relieved sigh so quiet, Laura’s not sure she was meant to hear it. 

“Thank Christ,” she mutters, and lifts her other hand to scrub briskly at her cheeks and forehead with both palms. She lifts her gaze to Laura then, gives Laura a small smile that’s an exhausted echo of her usual grin. “I don’t suppose, when we left the Tower, I thought to ask you to grab some clothes for me?”

_ Time’s up, Laura. You need a solution now.  _ “I’m sorry,” Laura says with a faint grimace. “I should have thought to get something of yours. You’re welcome to anything in my closet, or Clint’s, just like you were last time you were h—” 

Epiphany slaps her in the face, and her eyes widen as she realizes she has a solution after all. “Hang on,” she says, and forces herself to move calmly towards the closet instead of bouncing with the sudden surge of energy. Up on her tiptoes, she paws at the shelf above her blouses and skirts until she snags a fold of vinyl between her fingers and pulls down the vacuum-sealed and scent-neutral laundry she’d done for the Avengers during their unexpected visit a few weeks back that she hadn’t gotten around to shipping back to the Tower.

Toni's things are right on top, and Laura slides it off the stack with a smile. “I forgot you left some things here. You all did. A long sleeved t-shirt, a pair of jeans, a very lovely red bra and matching panties, socks.” She moves back towards the bed, and her smile slips away, because Toni's watching her with a faintly disbelieving expression, one eyebrow arched. “I know it's not nearly enough, if you'd like to stay awhile longer, but they're clean and they're yours.”

Toni holds out her hands and Laura puts the package in them, watches as Toni smooths her hand over the bag so lightly the vinyl barely crinkles. “I thought you'd just have thrown them out,” she says, and her tone is strange and quiet. 

Laura blinks, sits on the bed beside Toni, making sure to leave enough distance to not seem like she's intruding into Toni's personal space. “Why would I have? They're not mine, so I didn't have the right to decide they were trash. I always meant to send them back to you. I just got distracted with the new baby. I'm sorry if I made you think I'd destroyed your property, Toni. It wasn't my intention.”

Toni bites her lip, sets the package on the bed behind her, and turns to face Laura. Without saying a word, she leans forward and scoots in until Laura’s got no choice but enfold Toni in her arms. Laura’s not sure if Toni’s done it deliberately or not, but she ends up tucked right under Laura’s jaw, where Clint’s scent-mark forever lingers on Laura’s skin. “Thank you,” she breathes, and for the first time, relaxes completely and utterly.

Laura blinks rapidly, because her eyes are stinging with unexpected tears, and she has to clear her throat before she can speak. “You’re welcome,” she says, and tightens her embrace just a little. 

**oOoOoOo**

Breakfast has grown exponentially since Laura left it in Clint’s hands. Toasted golden hashbrowns, scrambled eggs and cheese, and bacon heaps in two piles, one crisp the way Laura prefers it, and the other chewy in what she can only presume is Toni’s preference. A carafe of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a fresh pot of coffee. The table’s been set — two places only, Laura notes with no small amount of concern — and the pans Clint no doubt used are drying in the dishrack.

Clint’s nowhere in sight, and Laura wants to sigh very heavily, but it’s about what she expected to find. She does note, however, that the six Pop Tarts she toasted before Clint came to get her for Toni, have disappeared.

Toni remains subdued and quiet, but loads a plate with enough food to replenish a small platoon and inhales it all. Laura’s torn between wanting to keep up a light, running commentary of inconsequential chatter to fill the silence, and wanting to respect Toni’s clear exhaustion by not making her feel obligated to converse and interact with her. In the end, she chooses silence, only speaking to ask Toni if she’d like another cup of coffee, and if she’s done with her plate so Laura can clear it.

Toni stares into her second cup of coffee, cradling it between her palms like she’s trying to absorb its heat through her hands, while Laura rinses the dishes and loads them into the dishwasher for a later cycle. When she’s done, she dries her hands and hangs the towel back on the oven door before turning to Toni once again. 

Toni looks up as she does, then drops her gaze back down to the cup and drums her fingers against it for a moment before picking it up and downing the contents in one long swallow.  “I should call someone,” she says, pushes her hands into her hair and flops back against the chair with a long, drawn-out sigh. “Toni fucking Stark can't disappear for long without someone taking notice, if only because I haven't submitted any new designs in awhile.”

Laura hesitates for a moment, then gives into the urge to reach out and tuck a lock of hair behind Toni's ear. She didn't expect the surge of humility at how trustingly Toni leans into her touch, but she doesn't mind it at all. “That's not the only thing you're good for,” she says softly. 

Toni grins up, tiny but real, and it heartens Laura to see it. “I know,” she says. “I'm also known for my stunning wit and complete lack of self-preservation.”

Laura repeats the hair tuck, cups Toni’s chin. “Toni…”

“Yeah yeah,” Toni says, waving a hand dismissively. “Deflection bullshit, badass mediator, blah blah. I’m joking.” A pause. She sighs, and the sparkle that’d been returning to her eyes drains as Laura watches, and she just looks tired beyond belief. “Okay, partly joking. Still, I should call Rhodey, or Pepper. Let them know where I am before you have an angry gunmetal grey suit of armor knocking on the door.”

Laura smiles, reminds herself that Rome wasn’t built in a day. “Want me to call for you?”

Toni rolls her eyes, and then rubs them tiredly. “Oh, you have no idea how much I love that idea, but Rhodey does enraged alpha so well, he should have a patent on it. If he doesn’t talk to me for at least a few minutes, you could be the Pope and he’d still come in guns blazing to rescue me from my kidnappers.” She sets her chin on her hands and her eyes slit to half-mast. “All I want to do is curl up and watch TV. Can we do that, Laura? After I call Rhodey?”

Laura’s breath catches in her throat, and she feels the burn of tears in her eyes for the second time in one morning. She isn’t completely sure how or why, but if Toni’s asking her for things she wants, actually  _ asking  _ for things she wants instead of trying to not be a bother… “Sure, sweetheart,” she says. “Anything you want to do is fine with me. You need anything before we go do that?”

Toni readjusts her head so she’s looking up at Laura through her hair, through her eyelashes, and Laura’s breath catches for entirely different reasons. “I need to borrow your cellphone,” she says, and this time, the smile is wicked and shit-eating. “I seem to have left mine in my other set of emperor’s new clothes.”


	6. Chapter 6

Toni makes a mental note to replace Laura’s three-generations-old Apple knock off with a brand-spanking-new custom-designed Starkphone at her earliest opportunity. It’s serviceable enough, she supposes, turning it over with no small amount of disgust in her hands, a cream-colored case that’s definitely been in the wars, battered by children and dings, nicks and scratches, with streaks and dots of what looks like craft paint, nail polish and pen ink speckled all over it. Serviceable enough for what she needs it to do, anyway.

But it’s not Stark tech, and she always feels slightly filthy handling anything that didn’t roll off her factory lines. 

She paces restlessly in the living room, holding onto Laura’s phone like it’s a lifeline, post-heat energy surging and swelling inside her. She knows it isn’t going to last, because despite the lengthy times between them, this isn’t her first heat, and rusty or not, she knows how these things go. Exhaustion will follow her swells of energy, until she’s in a bone-deep sleep nothing short of a full-scale riot could disturb. She can already feel the urge to sleep stalking along her extremities. 

She kind of has shit she needs to get done before she collapses into a heap.

The agitation is returning, she can feel that too, clawing at the back of her brain, trying to shred every last iota of  calm and happy fog still swirling her thoughts into stillness. She squeezes her hands into fists, focuses on the pressure of the phone case’s edges against her palm. It helps, a little, to chase the rising panic away. 

She sighs, rubs the heel of her free hand into her eye. She really doesn't want to make this call. Even the thought of Rhodey’s most likely reactions to the news that she's gone into heat — her top three picks, which she would wager her armor on, are outraged worry, aggressive sympathy, and alpha-driven overprotectiveness — is enough to exhausted her before she even dials the first digit of his number. 

If she still had JARVIS, she'd just call him and let him handle all the arrangements she needs to make, but she doesn't have JARVIS anymore. 

She heaves another sigh, flops onto the couch, and dials Rhodey's number from memory. She tries not to think about how shaky her hand is, even though she can feel the phone rattling finely against her earlobe. 

She listens to it ring and ring, pictures Rhodey on the other end eyeballing the caller ID and wondering what Laura Barton has to say to him. It helps to keep her from picturing his expression when he hears what she has to say. 

Finally, just when she thinks she'll have to settle for leaving a voicemail before hours of anxious waiting for him to return the call, she hears a wary “This is Rhodes” and closes her eyes in relief. 

“It's almost like you don't know the word  _ hello,  _ honey bear,” she says, and grins at the startled intake of breath from the other end. “You better be careful. I understand some people tend to find that rude.”

“Toni?” Ahh, there's the instant shift from polite and concerned acquaintance to hyper-protective alpha big brother she was hoping to avoid. “What the hell are you doing calling me from Laura Barton's phone? Are you okay?”

“That depends entirely on how you define  _ okay,  _ Rhodey,” she says, rubs her forehead and leans her head back against the couch. “Before you start suiting up to come save me, I'm going to tell you I'm physically okay, I'm safe with people I not only like and trust but went with willingly. I need you to remember that.”

There's a long silence, which never bodes well. She can practically hear Rhodey's jaw clenching and unclenching. “Toni, what the hell is going on?”

She winces, because his voice is only that tightly controlled when he's trying not to scream. “I went into heat,” she says softly, and has to jerk the phone away from her ear at the disbelieving and loud  _ WHAT?!  _ that answers her.

“Again,” she says, knows it’s just the hormones and pheromones, but finds it weirdly hilarious that  _ she’s _ being the calm one and tries to not break into laughter, “I’m physically okay and with people I like and trust. And went with willingly. That’s the really important bit.”

“Toni…” He sighs through his nose, and she hears the familiar sound of his body dropping onto the leather couch that used to be in her penthouse and is now in the den at the compound. “Jesus, Toni. I don’t even know where to start. Are you at the farm? I’ll come get—” His words cut off so abruptly his teeth click together and he sighs in frustration again. “ _ Do you want me _ to come get you? Say the word and I’m in the air in two minutes.”

“Sweetie, I’m just now past heat-haze. You could come out to the farm and check up on me if you want, but the only place I’m going is to bed. I’ve got a fucking awesome mental vacation already arranged. I’ll be in Aruba with calendar models and cabana boys whose only job is to rub suntan lotion onto my back.”

Silence again, which lets her hear the slight noise Laura makes as she comes into the living room with a cup of coffee in each hand. Toni smiles and shifts over so Laura can sit down, mouthing  _ thank you  _ when she takes the offered cup out of Laura’s hand. “Are you going to say anything, huggy bear, or has the rather tame image of oiled tens massaging me finally done you in?”

Rhodey makes a strangled noise, and Toni's grin widens. She knows she's going to hell for it, but she's never been able to resist tweaking him just a little.  “You promise you're okay, Toni? That your partner is….” An audible  swallow. “Jesus, Toni. I never thought I’d have to ask any of these awkward-ass questions again. I still don’t know how to even  _ begin  _ to ask.”

Toni rolls her eyes, drains her coffee cup and stretches out on the couch to settle her head in Laura’s lap. Laura’s hand comes down in her hair, starts to stroke gently through, and Toni closes her eyes with a smile. “I’m fine, Rhodey,” she says, stifles a yawn. “Come see for yourself. Bring my Starkpad when you do. I need to get some work done sooner or later. Oh, and speaking of work, could you call Pepper? I’d do it, but I’m pretty tired and she fucking terrifies me. Just tell her I’m taking some of my many accrued vacation days and also that I own the company.”

Rhodey starts talking, but Laura’s hand in her hair feels so nice and she’s just so tired that she barely even notices when Laura takes the phone away from her ear, speaks quietly into it,  or pulls a blanket over her. 

Her last thought is  _ I lied to Rhodey _ . She isn't planning on visiting Aruba in her dreams. She's gonna stay right where she is. She's safe and comfortable, so who needs imaginary sunburn?

**oOoOoOo**

Laura takes the phone out of Toni's slackening hand, shaking her head as Toni passes out, and lifts it to her ear. “Colonel Rhodes? It's Laura Barton. I'm afraid you're left with me, since Toni just fell asleep.”

There's a pause, and a deep, heavy sigh. “Good morning, Mrs. Barton,” he says. “I'm not quite sure how or why Toni ended up at your place, but I'm grateful you're looking after her.” Another pause, this one feeling like hesitation, so Laura just waits. “Listen, I understand you and I don't know each other very well, but Toni's been my best friend for twenty years. I'd appreciate it if you could set my mind at ease here.”

Laura smiles, looks down as Toni nestles into her leg a little more closely, and strokes her fingers through Toni's hair again. “I won't break any confidences, Colonel Rhodes, but I'll do my best to answer what I can. And please, call me Laura.”

“Fair enough. I'm Jim, or Rhodey. About Toni…” He clears his throat and is awkward as hell when he adds, “I’m assuming from what she said she had an alpha partner for her heat. I need to know if they treated her okay.”

Laura decides she likes Rhodes then and there. She knows a good many alphas, and not many of them try to be delicate with information they want. “Jim, I'll be forthright with you. Toni spent her heat with Clint and I.”

Rhodes starts coughing alarmingly hard and sudden. “I'm sorry?” he wheezes.

“I don't see why you should be,” Laura replies with a soft chuckle. “It was remarkably enjoyable.”

“I didn't mean to imply—”

“I know what you meant, Jim,” she says, but gently. “I just chose to answer it a different way, a way in which it's clear that everyone was safe, secure and consenting.”

There's silence again, but Laura waits patiently for Rhodes to digest what is no doubt unexpected information. “Man… now I just have even more questions.”

“Why don't you come out when you have a chance, then?” It's an impulsive decision to invite him, but it feels like the best thing she can do at this point. “You can see for yourself how Toni's doing and ask her, and us, any questions you have.”

Rhodes blows a long, drawn-out breath. “I'll be there in a few hours.” A pause. “You're a beta, aren't you?”

“Yes. Why?”

Rhodes laughs then, shaky but rich with amusement. “Because I'm not worried anymore,” he replies, and a humble sort of warmth blooms in Laura's chest. “Only a beta can do that for me in less than fifty words. Does Toni need anything? I can detour to the Tower and pick up a few things.”

Laura hesitates and looks down at Toni. In sleep, real sleep, she looks younger and more fragile. No walls and weapons of humor and ego to protect her. “I don't know how long she's planning on staying,” Laura says, and smooths Toni's hair away from her face. “But she's welcome for as long as she likes, and we were in a bit of a rush the other night. I'm sure she'd appreciate some clothes and her devices.”

“I'll do that,” Rhodes says. “Thank you again, Laura. Look forward to seeing you this afternoon.”

“See you then, Jim.”

Rhodes ends the call and her phone cuts out in response. She closes her eyes and relaxes back against the couch for a moment, listening to Toni’s soft snoring. It’s tempting to let herself drift into a doze, but she’s got too much to do. Luckily, at least one of those things she can do without moving. She opens her eyes and swipes up her phone app, holds down the key she’s assigned to her mother’s speed dial. 

She needs to hear her kids’ voices, and as different as she is from her mother in behaviour and belief, she thinks she could really use a more experienced beta’s advice.

**oOoOoOo**

Clint's fingers are bleeding for the first time in a long time, blistered and broken from a few pulls too many without his gloves. It had been tempting to leave off his bracer, let the sting of the string bruise and bleed him, but in the end, the thought of Laura worrying about his mental state was deterrent enough.

She's still not going to be happy about his hand, but it's a minor annoyance at best. A few Band-Aids and some aloe vera, and they'll be as good as new in a few days.

He packs his bow back in its case before moving downrange to pull the arrows out of the targets. It's a rote task, a routine thing that takes next to no thought to accomplish. But when his fingers close around the first shaft, an unexpected lump chokes his throat, and he has to swallow hard before he feels like he's breathing again.

High grade carbon steel, buffed to near frictionless aerodynamic perfection, feathered with synthetic hawk quills, painted in his favorite colors. Arrowheads sharp enough to pierce titanium-gold, cleverly delicate micro mechanisms to let him change out his payload in seconds. RFID tags he can activate to track his arrows, recover them, follow fleeing prey.

For the very first time, he  _ sees  _ how much work Toni's put into them, sees each individual arrow as one of the finest weapons he's ever owned. A dozen of them, he now has no doubt, would be astronomically and prohibitively expensive if he was any other archer.

But he's not any other archer. He gets an endless supply.

He brushes his thumb over the maker's mark stamped on the round bottom of the shaft, a faint etching placed where it fouls the streamlining the least. A stylized T, with a circle and triangle behind it. He's sure every arrow has it, but he's never noticed it before now. And that makes him feel even shittier about himself. Anything that rolls out of the factory gets the SI stamp. Toni uses the T to mark her work only when she's personally handcrafted it. 

He clears his throat, manages to dislodge the lump, and pulls the arrows one by one out of the targets, careful that he doesn't damage the mechanisms.

The T is on his quiver, just under the top buckle of the strap, and draws his eyes the second he picks the quiver up to store the bundle of arrows.

It's on his bow case too, a barely discernable set of ridges under his thumb on the handle.

“Jesus, Toni,” he breathes, and the fucking lump is back in his throat. That woman is going to fucking kill him at this rate. 

He glances at the sky to check the time, and figures he can't delay going back inside any longer. He's been out here for hours, and knows he's already pushed his luck by avoiding his wife and their… and Toni this long. 

Laura eyes him from the couch as he re-enters the house, and he cringes a little, because she looks unamused and is crooking her finger at him to indicate she wants him to come into the living room. He sighs faintly, stores his gear next to the kids’ rainboots in the foyer closet, and does as he's told.

Toni's asleep on the couch, her head pillowed on Laura's lap, and Laura's got her fingers moving through Toni's hair. “Feeling any better?” Laura asks softly.

“I'll let you know that when I figure it out myself,” he says, and rubs his eyes tiredly. “How are you two doing?”

“We're fine,” Laura replies, then points between him and Toni. “We need to talk about all this. I was hoping you'd come back in sooner, before Toni fell asleep.”

The faint chiding in her tone is pitched just enough that it simultaneously raises his hackles and makes him want to crawl into the nearest hole he can find. “What's to talk about?” He's harsher and angrier than he intended to be. “She was in need, we helped out, and then I crossed a line. End of fucking discussion.”

Laura  _ tsks,  _ shakes her head. “That's not what happened at all, and you know it.”

“That's exactly what happened,” he snaps, and the urge to flee rises so fast and strong, he's halfway out of the living room before he knows it.

“This isn’t something you get to run from. Come back here, honey,” Laura says firmly, and Clint halts, slumps, and turns around to slink back into the living room. 

“Remind me who’s the fucking alpha in this relationship?” he mutters. 

Laura arches an eyebrow, nonplussed. “You are,” she says, in a tone that suggests she also considers him to be the idiot in the relationship. 

She's not really wrong about that.

Laura watches him for a moment and her eyes soften with compassion. “She needs you to be here, Clint,” she says softly, and the rhythmic movement of her hand through Toni's hair falters. “I spoke to my mother while you were out.”

Great. Cos his shoulders weren't tight enough without the reminder of his beloved, busybody mother in law. “She say how the kids are doing?”

“They're fine. Lila is raising tadpoles at the pond, and Cooper’s out from dawn til dusk with some other kids in the area. Mom's bought him a couple of disposable cameras, so prepare to ooh and ahh over his photo collection when he comes home. I don't think she's put Nathan down yet.” Laura clears her throat quietly and shifts under Toni's head. “Can you trade places with me? I've had to pee for the last half hour, but I didn't want to leave Toni alone in case she woke up.”

Clint snorts. “And you think if she wakes up snuggled into me, she'll, what, smile and be happy?”

“Doesn't matter what I think,” Laura returns evenly, “because I need to goddamn pee.”

Reluctantly, he agrees with a nod of his head. It takes some doing, an application or three of quick reflexes, and a lot of careful movement, but eventually Clint frees Laura from being trapped under Toni, and somehow ends up sitting in Laura's spot on the couch with Toni curled up in his lap, head tucked under his chin.

Warmth and ease wash up and over him, and he can feel his shoulders unknotting. But he still glares at Laura, because he's pretty sure she just pulled a fast one on him, but he's not sure how. “This isn't taking your spot,” he says, faintly accusing. “This is becoming Toni's chair.”

Laura smiles as she stretches out one or two kinks in her back that let go with audible pops and fleeting grimaces. “I told Mom about Toni,” she says, and ignores Clint's hiss of shock. “She says to make sure we all stayed on close contact for a few hours, until our systems stabilize again. Something about the hormone rushes making us more susceptible to emotional crashes and physical symptoms.”

“You tricked me,” he shoots back, but there's less heat and snap to it than there should be. The fury drains, sucked away by the smell of Toni just under his nose, the warmth  a leaching into him through her clothes, the sound of her soft breathing. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Horseshit,” Laura says, and her smile broadens. “But you will be. You're already calming down, settling and relaxing. It's a good thing.” 

“This is entrapment and treachery, and I'll be filing a complaint with the Spouses Union.” He cracks open an eye when he hears her move, sees her walking toward the hallway. “Hey, where're you going?”

Laura doesn't stop, just throws a laugh over her shoulder as she disappears around the corner.  “I didn't trick you. I really do have to pee.”


	7. Chapter 7

The artificial calm generated by Laura Barton’s beta tones lasts until Rhodey ends the call and pockets his phone. That's when the worry and anxiety come shrieking back, amplified by his long history with Toni and his intimate knowledge of her history and her quirks. She’s always been weird about her heats, even those she chose to invite him to share.

She hasn’t, to his knowledge, shared a single heat with anyone since Afghanistan. Hasn’t mentioned it to him at all. He’s always assumed it was because she was choosing to spend them alone or, once she started dating Pepper, had a partner who would see her through them safely. That it wasn’t something she needed him to be with her for anymore, and maybe he’d been a little hurt, but he’d always known it was an occasional privilege, because Toni didn’t do permanency like that. 

But something in the way she confessed she’d gone into heat, and the fact that she apparently spent it with an alpha and a beta who are the spitting image of the permanency Toni’s allergic to… All of his hackles are alert and up, and he knows something is very wrong. 

He doesn’t think either Clint or Laura are capable of coercion on that scale, and he can’t see Toni, for all her lack of care what people think about what she wants, forcing her way into their relationship. He doesn’t know what happened, honestly, but he can say with certainty that none of it was forced or unwilling. 

Still… He knows that  _ something  _ had to have happened, something unprecedented and extreme. Because he’s known Toni for more than twenty years, and nothing about this is  _ right _ . 

He paces the length of his suite over and over, turning himself inside out trying to work out the logistics in his head. If JARVIS were still around, he could just ask him, because JARVIS and he have always been allies in the war against Toni's self-destruction. It occurs to him that he could ask Vision, but no one's sure how much of JARVIS is left, or even if Vision still cares about Toni in the same way he once did. 

“Screw it,” Rhodey growls, and on his next pass towards the door, chooses to walk through instead of turning to pace back towards the window. No time like the present to finally ask the damned android where his loyalties lie.

\-----

He finds Vision in the game room, but to his chagrin, the android isn’t alone. Wanda is sitting with him, and they appear to be in the middle of a chess game. That’s enough for Rhodey to pause, uncertain, because something about Wanda makes him uneasy. 

He knows she lost her brother not long ago, but he doesn’t think that’s it. The few moments of grief he’s seen in his admittedly rare interactions with her, he finds her the most human. It’s every other moment that crawls up his spine, the reports of her mind-rolling Banner and unleashing the Hulk on Johannesburg, how she’d been helping Ultron up to the point it was almost too late to stop him from killing every human on earth. 

It’s the unbridled hate he’s seen in her face when she looks at Toni. The sheer, spiteful, bitter rage glittering in her eyes. The sneering curl of her mouth when Toni said anything. There’s darkness in her, darkness grown and nurtured for the strict purpose of destroying anything associated with Stark. It would be nice to think that Wanda’s change of heart had been a hundred percent genuine, but Rhodey’s not naive enough to think that just because Barton told her to get her shit together, she’s actually gotten her shit together. 

Honestly, he doesn’t want to go anywhere near the Scarlet Witch, not the least because he has the faint, persistent worry that she’s going to go digging around in his head the same way she dug around in everyone else’s.

But things being what they are, there’s no way to avoid it if he wants to talk to Vision. He sighs, rubs his temples, then squares his shoulders and ambles over to where they’re sitting. It’s rude as hell, but he’s not running on much patience right now, so he ignores Wanda altogether and catches Vision’s attention. “Can I speak to you for a second, outside?”

They both look up, expressions eerily similar on their faces. Rhodey keeps his eyes on Vision, whose forehead creases slightly in a frown of concern. “Of course, Colonel Rhodes,” he says, and makes to stand. 

Wanda reaches out and tips her king over. “You may take my seat,” she says, and rises. “Thank you for the game, Vision.” She eyes Rhodey, and the smile she gives him looks friendly enough, but unease claws up his back again because there’s just something  _ off  _ about it. “It’s time for my afternoon meditations.”

Rhodey watches her go, drifting through the room until she’s through the door, and his shoulders refuse to unbunch the entire time. Only when the door has closed behind her does he feel comfortable enough to turn around, shake off the unease, and say, “We need to talk about Toni.”

Vision’s forehead furrows further, and Rhodey eyes the Mind Gem embedded in his skin warily. “I do not know how much help I can be regarding ma…. Ms. Stark,” he says. “I’m not JARVIS, Colonel.”

“That may be,” Rhodey says, and didn’t miss the slip between  _ ma’am  _ and  _ Ms. Stark,  _ “but I’m willing to bet you’re more JARVIS than you want to admit, and right now, that’s what I need.”

Vision’s silent for a long moment, and then he sighs. “Very well, Colonel Rhodes,” he says. “How may I be of assistance?”

**oOoOoOo**

It's been a long day butting heads with the intransigent Board, and Pepper's about ready to call it and head home to drown herself in a wine and cheese bubble bath when her private line rings. She hesitates, pulling it out of her pocket and eyeballing the caller ID like it's a live bomb. 

But it's not  _ T. Stark, _ like she thought it would be. It's  _ J. Rhodes _ , and that's unusual enough to have her on full alert as she thumbs the green answer button, and brings the phone to her ear.  “Hi, Jim,” she says. “What's wrong?”

“When you and Toni were together, did she have a heat?”

Pepper blinks, because out of everything she might have envisioned him asking, that's certainly never been on the list. “That's a little personal, don't you think?” she replies, maybe a little sharply given that it's Rhodey, but she's never been a fan of anyone prying into her private life.

“It is,” he says, and she frowns, because there's background noise that reminds her of all the times Toni's called her from inside the armor, chimes and chirps and the almost inaudible rush of wind and air pressure. “But right now, I don't give a shit. And neither will you, if you humor me for a minute.”

Instincts start screaming at her. Because it's Rhodey, who is respectful to a fault. Because it's Toni, who she still cares about deeply. Because there's something deeply disturbed in Rhodey's tones, disturbed and frantic. “No,” she says, sighing through her nose and pressing fingertips into her temple. “She never had a heat. Why?”

Rhodey's sharp, hissed intake of breath only serves to ramp up her concern. “She ever give you a reason?”

Pepper bites her lip. “It never really came up,” she says softly. “I've never been all that driven by alpha urges, so I don't know that I ever really questioned it. I just assumed the palladium had stopped her cycle. I never asked…” She squeezes her eyes shut, swallows hard. “What's going on, Jim?”

“Toni's been taking suppressants since Afghanistan,” he says, flat and blunt and harsh. “Vision told me a medic from SHIELD originally prescribed them, then a succession of doctors, and most recently, Banner’s been tailoring them for Toni's unique biochemistry.”

Pepper frowns, because that sounds horrible, but she's not sure why it's got Rhodey in such a state. “Obviously, she needs to stop taking them for awhile,” she says, “but I don't understand the—”

“They stopped working,” Rhodey cuts her off. “She went into heat last week. Did you get a call? I didn't get a call. I contacted FRIDAY and she's still got the place on lockdown from when Toni ordered it. Five days ago.”

Unbidden, she raises her eyes to the ceiling, because Toni's living space begins where her office ceiling ends, and feels ice cold horror shiver down her back. “Five days,” she repeats faintly. “She's been up there for five days by herself in heat?”

“No,” Rhodey says, and Pepper wants to sag in relief. “Somehow or another, the Bartons found her and kept her safe. She's at their farm. I spoke to her myself, she called me, and she's okay.”

She's not going to question that terribly hard at the moment, because she's met Laura Barton and doesn't think a more sensible beta exists on earth that that woman. “Thank God,” she mutters, and gives into the urge to sink back into her comfortable executive chair because standing is too much effort at the moment. “What do you need me to do?”

“Couple of things,” Rhodey says, and she glances out the window as movement catches her attention. “First, I need you to lift the lockdown in the penthouse so I can get some stuff for Toni, since she wants to stay at the farm for awhile.”

Pepper rises to her feet, tracking the distant streak, like a bird or a plane…. She finds her mouth curving into a smile, because it's neither a bird nor a plane. It's War Machine, and it looks like he's coming in for a landing on her balcony. “What's the second thing?” she says and walks to the balcony doors to unlock them.

“We need Banner,” he says, and hovers in the sky for just a moment.  “Because Vision said Toni'd have to be off her meds for months before she had a heat again, and his memories of JARVIS show her taking them regularly right up to the minute JARVIS died.”

Pepper watches him steadily as he touches down, finds oddly she was expecting the Iron Man three point crouch instead of a sedate landing, shakes herself out of it. “Leave Banner to me,” she says, hangs up as Rhodey steps out of his armor. “I know just who to call.”

**oOoOoOo**

An uncomfortable sort of feeling prickles along the back of Natasha's neck, the same one that warns her when a mission is about to go sideways, or someone’s about to ambush her from the shadows. She’s learned to listen to it over the years, because it’s saved her life on any number of occasions. So when it starts tingling across the nape of her neck, Natasha stops dead in the middle of the hall, shoulders bunched and body tensed for flight or flight, ignoring the odd look a passing staffer gives her as he passes. 

_ Where is it coming from? Where’s the attack?  _ The scratchy feeling builds and crescendos to a point she wants to claw her skin off, and she grits her teeth in a half-snarl. Then her phone vibrates against her hip, and the feeling vanishes like it never was. 

The caller ID reads  _ Pepper _ , so she swipes to answer and lifts the phone to her ear. “Hey, Pepper. What’s up?” There’s a long silence on the other end, long enough that Natasha’s unease starts to creep back. “Pepper? Are you there?”

“Nat,” Pepper says, and her tone sounds normal enough, friendly enough but Natasha’s been around her long enough to hear the tightly leashed control in her voice, and she goes from cautious concern to hyperalert instantly. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m wondering if you could do me a big favor.”

Suddenly feeling overexposed in the hallway with passing compound staff, and feeling a little ridiculous for feeling that way, she finds an empty conference room and ducks inside before replying. “Of course,” she says, and ensures the door is closed. “Is everything alright? You sound …” She hesitates, because she doesn’t have the right word to describe it. 

But Pepper seems to get it anyway, because she just laughs tiredly, humorlessly. “No, everything's not alright,” she says with a frustrated sigh, and in her mind’s eye, Nat can picture her pinching the bridge of her nose to relieve tension, pushing her hands through her hair to ease stress. “And I don’t want to get into it over the phone. Can you come to SI, Nat? Can you come now?”

She has too much to do here to leave for any foreseeable length of time, and she knows Pepper knows that. Which means if Pepper is asking… “Of course I can,” she says. “Your office?” 

“No,” Pepper replies, voice gone soft and terrifyingly worried. “Come up to the penthouse.”

Natasha lets out a long breath, squares her shoulders. “I’m on my way,” she says, and throws open the door to start striding towards the quinjet hangars. “Be there as soon as I can.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally updating! This is only the first third of the outline I had originally done, but these three demanded I give them appropriate space to do their thing. 
> 
> Maybe not so Wanda-friendly.

Natasha isn’t sure how, and she isn’t sure when, but she knows without any doubt at all that  _ someone  _ is going to die for this. 

She stands in the middle of the kitchen of the Avengers portion of the Tower, arms folded tightly across her chest, less to express disgust or to clutch herself in horror, and more to keep her body from shaking itself to pieces with rage. Only decades of self-discipline and mental centering exercises keep her from stalking the floor with teeth bared and hackles raised in agitation like Rhodey and Pepper are currently doing.

Keeping herself from going out and utilizing her extensive range of investigatory, infiltration and interrogation skill set to locate the person responsible for this travesty and  _ make them pay.  _ The only saving grace she can find to this shitshow in motion is that Toni ended up with Clint and Laura, two people Natasha knows with absolute certainty will treat Toni with the respect and consideration she deserves.

Pepper and Rhodey circle around her like restless sharks. Rhodey is muttering things under his breath that even her sharp hearing can't catch, but his tone is ominous and dire. Pepper's steps are rapid, staccato, every line of her svelte form tense and perfectly pressed except her hair, a wild tangle freed from its scrunchie and missed by repeated applications of anxious fingers through it. In all honesty, she can't blame either of them for their reactions. It's taking all she's got to keep herself from breaking things and looking for asses to kick.

She closes her eyes, squeezing the bridge of her nose between a finger and thumb, and takes a deep breath she immediately regrets, because it fills her nose with the smell of sickly-stale heat, churning her stomach, swelling the barely-contained fury behind her eyes, and stirring bad memories she’d hoped were buried forever.

“The Red Room did things like this,” she says. Her voice is quiet, but in the silence of the room, easily carries over Rhodey’s muttering and Pepper’s heel clicks. She opens her eyes, finds herself looking at the obvious nest in the middle of the room, the disarray, the disorganization, the obvious suffering that happened in it. She can feel muscles in her jaw jumping, feel her back teeth protesting under the pressure they’re under, and starts back at the first step of her calming techniques again.

“The… Red Room?” Most of the growling has disappeared from Rhodey’s voice, but his tones are still low and harsh, and alpha aggression overshadows his face. Natasha does her absolute best to not take it as a personal challenge, because she knows it isn’t, but with her own instincts awake and unsettled, it’s far harder than it should be to rein it in. “Isn’t that the program that made you Black Widow?”

Her lip curls into a snarl as the buried memories surge again, and she finally gives into the edgy urge to pace and stalk, now that the other two have stopped moving about. “That’s one way of putting it,” she says over her shoulder as she passes between them. “Probably the only way you could put it politely. Madame B liked to bring in omegas to …. test us. It always smelled like it does in here now for days afterwards.”

There’s silence behind her as she glides across the floor, eating up marble tiling with long-legged strides. “FRIDAY,” Rhodey says, and a tiny part of Natasha’s heart goes out to him for how sickened he sounds at the implications she left hanging in the air. “Could you crack open some windows or something, please? I can't think with this scent in here.”

“Of course, Colonel,” FRIDAY responds promptly.

A quiet whirring begins as the AI engages the air exchange system; it’s neither loud nor unfamiliar, but Natasha jumps anyway. A moment later, the cool wash of fresh air hits her cheeks, and she takes a deep breath through her nose, grateful to begin clearing her head of the sick scent and the dark memories.

It doesn’t take long before whatever marvel of engineering Toni installed in the tower has scrubbed all traces of smell out of the air. Natasha lets her last restless pass around the room bring her to Rhodey and Pepper’s sides, and halts there, refolding her arms back across her chest. 

“God,” Pepper mutters, closing her eyes and tilting her head back to breathe deep. “That’s so much better.” She plunges her hands into her hair again, but this time begins finger-combing it out of its disheveled mess. Natasha pulls a comb from her pocket and silently holds it out until Pepper opens her eyes, spots it being offered and takes it with a wry smile. 

“It is, isn’t it?” Rhodey is still looking murderous, but his eyes are clear and he’s stopped snarling. He nudges the nest of couch cushions and throw pillows with the tip of his boot and scowls darkly. “How the hell does this even happen? Even a solo heat should be safe for omegas who choose to not have a partner. It shouldn’t be… _ this.” _ He nudges the pillows again, and a ghost of the smell wafts up as the nest collapses on itself. He recoils back, hand flying to his nose.

Natasha takes a hasty step backwards, and Pepper skitters away with a noise of distress. “There are ways to do it,” Natasha says evenly, when she’s sure none of them are going to start going feral again. “There are a handful of plant and animal toxins that could induce it. A number of drugs and chemical compounds. Disease or injury. And…” She hesitates, staring blindly at the far wall, because there’s something ugly swimming beneath the surface of her thoughts, something that gleams with red witchlight and echoes with faint ballet music. 

A cool hand touches her wrist, and she starts, jerks her head up to see Pepper peering at her with a frown of concern. “Nat, are you okay?”

“No,” Natasha says flatly, because nothing about this is okay. Nothing about this makes her feel anything but crawling horror and abject shame. “But I’m not the issue here. Forget me for the moment. I’ll be fine.”

“I spent two thirds of my life listening to that bullshit come out of Toni’s mouth.” When she glances over, Rhodey’s got the same worried furrow between his eyebrows that Pepper does, and it’s all Natasha can do to not roll her eyes at it. “I know a line of bullshit when I hear it. You just went somewhere unpleasant.” A beat, then, “What’d you think of?”

She squeezes her eyes shut, massages her temples with circular motions that do absolutely nothing to settle the migraine she can feel starting behind her sinuses. She doesn’t want to even voice the suspicion, doesn’t want to think that anyone she shares living space with, anyone she’s come to consider forgiving her transgressions, is capable of doing what she’s thinking. But that feeling is in the pit of her stomach again, the one that always heralds when things are about to go ugly and sideways, and she trusts her gut more than anything or anyone else. 

She sighs, raises her head, sees Rhodey and Pepper eyeing her with varying degrees of patience. “Mental and behavioural conditioning,” she finishes, resigned. “Subliminal triggers, suggestive thoughts planted in the subconscious.”

Pepper’s frown deepens, turns into faint confusion, but Natasha knows Rhodey’s following her train of thought when his eyes widen and goes ashen-grey. He swipes at his  “Could she have done that?” he asks, faint and shocky. 

Natasha shrugs. “I’d like to think not, but it’s probably well within her abilities.”

“Jesus,” he breathes, blindly feels around behind him until he finds the armchair and slowly sinks onto the arm with the speed and care of a hundred-year-old man. 

“I’m not following this,” Pepper says, a slight hint of irritation underscoring the worry in her frown. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Wanda,” Rhodey says quietly, and scrubs his face with both hands. “She’s talking about Wanda messing with the Avengers the first time they met, at the Hydra compound in Sokovia when they were looking for the scepter.”

Horror and disbelief flash across Pepper’s face, through her eyes, and she turns a pale expression to Natasha. “She did that?”

Natasha nods, keeps her face impassive and blank as Pepper’s expression grows more disturbed. “When we were raiding the facility, she and her brother engaged us, got into our heads with her abilities. Made us see our worst fears.” She hesitates again, squeezes her eyes shut briefly and then sighs. “She managed to dig deep enough in Bruce’s head to trigger the Hulk, unleashed him on Johannesburg. She brought the Red Room back to me. Thor was so twisted up, he left to go on some vision quest not long afterward to figure it out.” She shakes her head. “Toni never said what she saw, but she came back from Sokovia like she had a mission to save the world. I assume it was just as horrible as everyone else’s.”

“And … you think…” Pepper’s face is absolutely bloodless, twisted into a horrible rictus of disbelief and disgust, and she keeps pausing to swallow hard in between words. “You think Wanda…. Could have…”

“She hates Toni,” Rhodey says, stares at his fingers as he threads them together between his knees. “Yeah. She could have. Without question.”

“But we don’t know if she did,” Natasha says, tilts her head at his dirty look, arches an eyebrow in return. “So we should probably find out if she did before we accuse her of doing something this depraved.”

“Natasha’s right.” Pepper clears her throat, and Natasha can almost see Pepper pulling herself together. It’s a little impressive how swiftly Pepper can be on the verge of throwing up one moment, and in the space of a handful of seconds, have herself composed and under control and in charge once more. “We need more information. But first, we need to make sure Toni’s fine.”

“I’m heading out to the Barton farm,” Rhodey says and stands. “She’s gonna be staying there awhile, she says, so I’ll bring her out clothes and her phone and her tablet. Probably one of the suits too, if I can figure out which Backstreet Boys song title she changed my access code to this time.”

“Good,” Pepper says with a firm nod at Rhodey. “Do that. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you. In the meantime…” Pepper’s gaze shifts to Natasha, and she eyes her speculatively. “If you’re free, I have something I’d like you to do for me.”

Natasha shrugs, doesn’t even need to think about whether she’s got things on the docket or not. If she does, they just got moved down the priority list. She’s terrible at expressing it, but she considers Toni one of her best friends, trusts her almost more than she’s trusted anyone else in her life. If someone screwed around with her heats, dealing with that someone just took the top spot on her To Do list. “I don’t have anything pressing on my plate, Pepper. What do you need me to do?”

Pepper bites her lip, looks down for a moment, then looks back up with steel in her eyes. “I understand Bruce knew Toni is an omega,” she says. “Vision told Jim that Bruce looked after Toni’s medical needs. There are some… complications we need to consider as we try to figure out what the hell went wrong, and Bruce has the answers.” Pepper’s expression hardens into something cold, ruthless and scary. Natasha thinks it must be the face she wears during Board meetings at Stark Industries. “I know he disappeared after Sokovia. Think you can track him down and drag his ass back to me for a few polite questions?”

Natasha feels a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth, and she allows it to grow into a smirk. “Absolutely,” she says, and Pepper relaxes. 

“I’ll start looking into those other things you mentioned,” Pepper says, and turns away, brushing invisible lint off her skirt. Without turning back, she says, “I don’t need to remind either of you that this is pretty delicate. Toni and I may not be together anymore, but she deserves privacy and respect, and I will  _ end  _ anyone who breaks her confidence and trust.”

Natasha blinks, because Pepper’s tone didn’t change at all, but there’s still a small chill shivering down her spine at the implied threat. She almost wants to ask Pepper to teach her how to do that. Instead, she says, “Of course. Client confidentiality is always a priority in my line of work.”

“Toni’s my best friend,” Rhodey says, somewhat offended. “Protecting her has been my job since we were in college.”

Pepper smiles in apology. “Then we’re all on the same page, Jim.” She looks around, blows out a heavy sigh, and deflates a little. “I’ll get janitorial up here to tidy up,” she says as her shoulders slump. “There won’t be anything to remind us, or Toni, what happened here by the time they’re done. You’re heading up to the penthouse, Jim?” At Rhodey’s affirmative, she nods. “Then I’ll leave you to it. Nat, will you join me in my office to go over logistics? Expense account, resources, that sort of thing?”

Both of Natasha’s eyebrows go up. “I’d do this for free, Pepper. It’s not necessary to officially hire me.”

“I know you would,” Pepper replies, waving dismissively at Natasha over Rhodey’s shoulder as she gives him a farewell hug. “Which is why I’m going to make sure you have the resources you need for wherever you have to go and whatever you have to do. I want Banner ASAP, and that means paying the best what they’re worth.”

Oddly, she’s touched at the gesture. “Works for me,” she says, and absolutely does not have to speak past a small lump balled up in her throat. “Let’s get started.”

Rhodey’s hand touches her shoulder as she turns away, and she glances back at him questioningly. There’s something she can’t identify in his eyes, some expression she’s never seen and doesn’t know how to name. “If Wanda did this,” he says, and pauses to swallow. “If she did this to Toni, could she have done it to Clint too?”

She covers Rhodey’s hand with her own, because she knows why he’s asking. “No, Rhodey,” she says gently, squeezes his fingers in comfort. “She never got near Clint. He fried her ass with a taser before she could touch him. If she’s responsible for it, I don’t think she had time to screw around with anyone else. We were all a little busy fighting an army of killer robots.”

That strange, undefinable, unsettling thing in Rhodey’s face dissolves into relief, and Natasha’s glad to see it go. “Okay then,” he says and gives her a tired smile. “I’m going to go get Toni’s stuff and get in the air. Call me if you need anything, Nat.”

“I will.” She won’t, and she knows Rhodey knows that, but for some reason, it reassures her that Rhodey’s willing to have her back if she requires him to. “Tell Toni and Clint and Laura I said hello.”

“I will.” And she knows he will, because Rhodey’s just that dependable. She smiles faintly as he turns away and watches him head towards the elevator up to the penthouse, and doesn’t envy him the mess he’s likely to find up there, even if FRIDAY aired any lingering scent out of Toni’s residence. Then she turns back to Pepper, waiting patiently for her at the elevator down to the corporate sections, and starts pulling on her professional mindframe, running through mental checklists of fees and supplies she’s likely to require. 

Time to hunt down the Hulk, and haul him back to face Pepper’s questions. If she’s lucky, Pepper will leave just enough of him for Natasha to get a few answers to some personal questions she has for Bruce herself.


	9. Chapter 9

Toni remembers times like this, waking warm and safe and completely engulfed in the security of protective arms and a heady alpha scent. They’ve always been her favorite part of post-heat recovery, curling up against her alpha, usually Rhodey, and floating in the sea of pleasantly blurry thoughts until her body finished normalizing. There’s always been a profound sense of intimacy in post-heat cuddling to her, far more intimate than sex, broader and deeper than her fleeting crushes. If she had to pick a description for it, she’d call it  _ being loved. _

She feels better than she has in longer than she can remember, clear-headed and content. For the moment, and least, there's no anxiety surging her heart rate, no chaos carving spirals through her mind. There’s no hunger crawling just under her skin, no desperation for someone, anyone, to touch her. No fear or reluctance chewing her up at the thought of asking someone to do it.

She is, perhaps for the first time ever, entirely and completely comfortable.

It’s not going to last, and she knows it won’t. It’s artificial, this calm, generated by a satisfied heat and the safe haven in which she finds herself. Sooner or later, the guilt and horror of what she’s done while she wasn’t in control of herself will come roaring back to devour her, and she’ll have to deal with all the fallout of her actions. And it’s probably one of the more selfish things she’s ever done, something she’ll deeply regret when her senses return from their vacation, but she doesn’t open her eyes or try to get out of the embrace cradling her. She should, she knows she should, but right now, she needs the comfort and fleeting illusion of being loved more than she needs to assuage her conscience. 

The first pangs of guilt hit when she gives up the pretense of being asleep in order to feed the urge to fill herself with Clint’s scent, and lifts her head slightly to brush her nose along his jaw. She inhales deep and slow, almost playfully, and lets her mind swim with the mingled scents of Laura and Clint she picks up from just behind his ear. A contented sound, maybe unintelligible words, maybe just a noise, rumbles in his chest, and his arms tighten around her as his nose turns into her hair. Underneath the shiver of delight it triggers in her stomach, bile churns, tinges it sour, burns the back of her throat.

She has no right to this, that faint nausea tells her, and she needs to stop doing it before she compounds her transgressions. She ignores the impulse, faint and weak, and continues to breathe in the scent, continues to let it fill her with its comfort and security, until Clint inhales sharply through his nose. His relaxed sprawl turns tight and tense under her hands, and the good feelings keeping her buoyant and floating drain abruptly.

Lifting her head away from his throat is the hardest thing she’s ever done to date, but she swallows hard and does it anyway. She doesn’t want to meet his eyes, doesn’t want to see fear, anger, betrayal, shock, hurt, or anything else she imagines he’s feeling cross his face, doesn’t want to leave the cocoon of peace, but she does that anyway too, and a black hole opens in the pit of her stomach at the haunted, washed-out blue she sees in place of the normal sparkling shine. 

“Hey,” he says, soft, tentative, after a long moment of staring at her with that horrible look, and his eyes drop away from hers at the same time his hands come away from her back.

She swallows again, against another surge of bile. “Hey,” she says, just as soft and wary, and slides sideways off his lap until she’s completely clear of him. She pulls her legs into her chest, and hugs her arms around them, making herself as small a ball to take up the least amount of couch she can, giving him as much space as she can. 

It becomes apparent that even that isn’t enough, because he flinches and pales, hastily stands, and leaves the couch entirely to her to stand as far away from her as he can, near the wide window on the other side of the room. She tries not to feel misery, tries not to let it show in her body language, but she’s probably failing spectacularly. God, what the hell has she done to him? 

He clears his throat a couple of times, pale and unhappy, then finally sighs and lifts his gaze to her again. “How are you feeling?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that, not without throwing up, breaking down into tears, or apologizing a hundred different ways for things she can’t possibly ever fix. “Fine,” she says, mostly into her knees, and it’s her turn to look away from him. “You?”

“Great,” he replies with a blatantly forced cheer. 

Silence doesn’t so much descend as it rushes into the room around them, shoving against her, into her, until it’s choking her with cold, ruthless hands, until she feels like she’s never going to breathe properly again. She wants nothing more than to unbunch from her ball on the couch and start running as fast and as far as she can, but the icy silence holds her still, keeps her frozen where she is. 

The sound of a door opening from the other end of the house, and then closing again, is louder than a gunshot, and Toni jumps in fright, hissing in startlement at the same time Clint swears in heartfelt viciousness across the room. 

“Laundry’s hung on the line,” Toni hears Laura call out, accompanied by the distinctive sound of the fridge opening, and the clinking of glassware likely being set on the countertop before the faint rush of liquid being poured and a cup filling up. “Is Toni awake yet, honey?”

“She is,” Clint replies, at the same time Toni says, “I am.”

“Good,” Laura says cheerfully, sounding a lot closer than the kitchen now. “How are you both feeling? Any better or…” 

Toni barely resists the urge to hunker down, flinch away into the safety of her ball as Laura appears around the frame of the door and freezes there mid-sentence, looking back and forth between her and Clint. “What’s wrong?” she asks, and worry sharpens her tone to urgency. “What happened?”

Toni says nothing, just squeezes her eyes shut and buries her face in her thighs. She doesn’t hear Clint say anything either, and the silence tightens its grasp on her throat. It stretches and tenses, and she shivers under its stranglehold until it’s an unbearable weight that threatens to break her to pieces if she doesn’t break it first.

And then Laura breaks it for her, with a quick inhale and an exasperated, “Oh, for the love of God. No. We are not doing this. Not here. Not now. Not at all. It’s not happening.”

“Laura... don’t.” Clint says in a pained tone that sounds weak to Toni’s ears. 

She hesitantly lifts her head from her knees, and finds Laura still standing in the door with both hands on her hips, scowling at Clint. Laura’s feet are planted in a no-nonsense stance that weirdly reminds Toni of Ana Jarvis catching her pilfering fresh-made cookies from the kitchen. 

“Don’t what, Clint?” Laura asks, takes two steps into the room and plants herself again in a better position to glare at both of them at the same time. “Don’t address the problem manifesting itself in my living room? Don’t act like a beta? Don’t interrupt your hair shirt and self-flagellation? Don’t be concerned or worried that I can’t turn my back for five minutes before you’re merrily wallowing around in guilt over a terrible sin you think you’ve committed?”

Clint jerks upright, like Laura just slapped him, sucks in a noisy breath and then slumps again. “Don’t blame Toni for this,” he says tiredly. “It’s my fault.”

Toni blinks and lifts her head involuntarily, blinks again, because that just does not parse and she’s abruptly lost. “Wait, what? No, it’s not. I’m the one who--”

Laura’s eyes swing to her and Toni snaps her mouth closed, shrinking down into her ball again. “Clint,” Laura says without taking her eyes off Toni, “be a dear and sit on the couch so I’m not twisting back and forth to talk to you both at the same time, will you?”

Clint opens his mouth and closes it a few times, then sighs and closes his eyes briefly. “Yes, dear,” he says, resigned, and moves to the end opposite where Toni's curled to sit.

“That's better,” Laura says with a pleasant smile, and takes a seat on the coffee table between them, perching on the edge. “Now, someone please tell me what happened while I was outside? I can smell distress on both of you. It’s not a healthy sign after a long heat or rut, and it’s worrying me.”

Toni swallows hard and tucks her chin between her knees. “I’m sorry,” she says, and keeps her eyes fixed on a point somewhere near the floor on the opposite wall, just so she doesn’t have to look at either of them.

Laura’s reply is gentle. “For what, sweetheart?”

Toni shakes her head. “Everything. Losing control. Being selfish. Taking without asking. Forcing you to…” A ball of tight, hot emotion chokes off her words and she falls silent, shakes her head again and presses her forehead against her legs. 

Laura’s hand slides over her knees, warm and soft, resting gently against her. “I thought we went over this,” she says. “You didn’t make us do anything, Toni. We asked you to come here with us. We had a choice.”

“I’m just screwing everything up here,” Toni says, and resists the tempting impulse to lean into Laura’s light touch. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix it.” 

There’s silence, quiet enough that the sound of Laura’s cell phone vibrating on the counter in the kitchen is perfectly audible. Laura clears her throat. “I need to take that, I think. I’ll be right back.” 

There’s noise that sounds suspiciously like a foot kicking another, and Clint makes a muffled grunt of pain as Laura’s footsteps recede into the house. “Laura says,” he says a moment later, hesitant, and stops to clear his throat. “Laura says physical contact helps stabilize everything. Can I… will you come back to me? I understand if you won’t, Toni, and Christ, I’m so sorry, but if you can, maybe it’ll help you.”

Startled, she lifts her head and turns to look at him, blinking in surprise at the expression she sees on his face. It’s not pain or fear or anything she thought it would be. It’s guilt, shame maybe, a sick feeling turned inward. She should have recognized it from the start, because she’s seen it often enough in the mirror to know what it looks like. “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything wrong. It was my fault.”

The guilt washes off his face, giving way to confusion and something akin to shock. “You’re joking, right? No, of course you’re not. Toni, none of any of this --” And his hand makes a looping circle, finger pointed up, indicating the three of them. “None of it is on you to carry. You’re the one who did nothing wrong. Jesus Christ, Stark. You are not responsible for what I did to you.”

She gapes at him for a moment, jarred enough by the unexpectedness of it all to uncurl from her tight ball as she surges to her feet. “What the fuck are you talking about, Barton? I practically mauled you  _ and  _ your wife for god knows how many days, and you think  _ you’re  _ the one that did something to  _ me?”  _

He sits and stares up at her in stunned bafflement, and then he’s on his feet too. He’s only got a couple of inches height on her, but it may as well be a foot by how well he’s managing to loom without actually looming. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe we liked being mauled? That maybe, just maybe, we didn’t have to be drunk on your scent to get into bed with you? That maybe we liked having you in bed with us?”

Her hands fist at her sides. “No,” she says icily. “It didn’t occur to me, because once you realized what the fuck we were doing this morning, you ran out of the room like someone lit your ass on fire. When you realized what you were doing and with who…” Those fists pressed against her thighs are so tight now they’re practically vibrating. “Just admit it, it’s not something you’d do if I hadn’t fucked up your senses.”

“You were terrified of me!” Clint rails back, and she’s not sure who actually steps forward first, but suddenly they’re nose to nose and glaring at each other. “And no fucking wonder you were, since I didn’t bother asking you what you wanted. The second you told me to get off you, I knew I'd taken advantage and I didn't want to upset you any more than I already had!”

Once more stunned into silence, all Toni can do is stare at Clint in disbelief. She opens her mouth, shuts it when nothing comes out and takes a step back, raising her hands when Clint makes a motion like he's about to reach out for her. “I need a second,” she says, shaking her head. “Just give me a second.”

She starts to take another step back, and yelps when she’s abruptly whirled into the arms of Laura, who looks as surprised to find Toni in her space as Toni is to find herself there. And then she hears the words that both weaken her knees in relief and churn up anxiety in her stomach again. 

“Take as much time as you need, Tones,” Rhodey says with tightly-leashed fury as he stalks past her, shoulders tight and set, pausing only long enough to stroke down her arm in a familiar, comforting gesture. “Agent Barton and I need to have a few words outside while you’re getting yourself back together.”


End file.
